Paradise Found
by Problematic Wesker Stans
Summary: Evil wins. Civilization crumbles. Instead of letting his friends and family fall to the chaos, Chris strikes a bargain with the devil. Albert Wesker will save their souls...but on his terms. He will ascend as a god in this new, cleansed world. And nothing will get in the way of his plans.
1. Twenty-Four Hour Window

**Chapter One: Twenty-Four Hour Window**

 _"And as he, who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore, turns to the perilous waters and gazes."_

 _― Dante Alighieri, Inferno_ **  
**

 _ **July 2, 2009**_

Claire stared at the painting of a rosy sunset on the wall across from the toilet.

She blinked.

It made no sense. There was…a window to her right, overlooking the cerulean ocean. Plenty of real sunsets out there.

The painting was a clumsy, kitschy imitation of the real thing. Something she'd see in a dentist's office - a meaningless piece of art meant to fade into the background. Streaky acrylics caught the fluorescent lights.

No sense.

She set the little cup full of her urine on the countertop next to her. The pale yellow fluid sloshed over the brim, and a drop trailed slowly down the side. She didn't bother wiping it off with the balled up toilet paper in her hand.

 _How fucking embarrassing_ , she thought, rubbing her face.

Above her, a fan purred, stirring the warm air in the room. She watched a sea bird she couldn't name land on the surface of the water, tucking in its wings and riding on the gentle waves.

There was a sharp rap on the door.

"Whenever you're ready, Ms. Redfield." His voice was muffled through the wood, but reliably monotonous.

She closed her eyes and hung her head.

* * *

Wesker snapped a glove over his wrist.

Claire hovered awkwardly in the far corner of the tiny bathroom, sticking close to the opposite wall. The more distance between them, the better - and she watched warily as he moved, her muscles tensed and ready to pounce. To run. To claw her way through the door.

But he worked slowly, and calmly. He moved with a kind of precise, mechanical detachment, and he didn't say a word.

He barely seemed to notice her.

He barely seemed to notice _anything._ He seemed completely unfazed by all of it - by her, by the too-small room, by the gulls crying outside.

By the fact that the world had split apart at the seams, leaving her here.

In a bathroom of an abandoned all-inclusive couples resort.

Trapped on a tropical island in the Pacific.

Standing next to Albert Wesker as he scrutinized a cup full of her piss.

 _Business as usual._

The room was silent save for the hum of the fan, and the buzzing lights, and the rush of breeze and waves through the window. She took a deep breath through her nose. The heat was stifling, and she plucked her sweat-soaked tank top away from her skin, bitterly wondering how long this _examination_ would take.

"How do you know I'm close?" she finally asked, crossing her arms tightly over her chest.

He picked out a packet from the bright pink box. She couldn't read the label - it was all in French. "I can smell you."

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

He sighed, tearing open the plastic wrapping. "I mean...it's possible for me to detect minute changes in the cycles of the human reproductive system."

Her upper lip curled into a sneer at the invasive thought. She glared at him, watching as he scanned the contents of the packet.

"That's really fucking disgusting," she said quietly.

Wesker turned, sending her a pointed red stare over his shoulder.

She felt herself shrink away beneath the look, still half-anticipating that he might change his mind and kill her on the spot. But he only went back to the task at hand, dipping what appeared to a litmus test strip into the cup. "Trust that it's not the most pleasant experience for me either," he muttered.

She was silent for a moment, watching as he let the strip soak up her urine. She chewed a nail. Her stomach churned with raw nerves and the sickeningly sweet residue of cherry hand soap.

He laid the yellowed strip on a folded paper towel and stepped back…waiting.

"So...do I smell… _bad_?" she asked hesitantly.

He shook his head, not bothering to look at her.

She frowned at his lack of an answer. The thought of having any kind of civil conversation with him disgusted her. The thought of being in the same _room_ with him disgusted her. But she pushed on, curiosity outweighing her apprehension. "Well…what do I smell —"

"Ripe." He cut her off. "You smell ripe. Ready. Something like a hot, wet night." He studied the little strip as he spoke.

She stood dumbly, forcing herself not to gape at his description of her scent. Something about it was so...invasive.

 _Lurid,_ even. His choice of words...

"Egg-white discharge? Tender breasts?" he asked casually.

"What the fu… _what_?" she snarled, the fear she'd felt moments ago evaporating.

He looked up then, his body going limp with exasperation. "The symptoms of ovulation. Do you have discharge, the consistency of egg whites, even when not aroused? Are your breasts sore at all? Do your moods feel…" He spoke quickly, and gestured dismissively. "Amplified, somehow?"

She hugged herself tightly, and remained silent as he seemed to examine the most intimate things about her.

"I'll take that as _yes_ , then." He eyed his watch, and then compared the used strip with the chart on the back of the colorful box. "Hmm." He looked thoughtful as he balled up the paper towel and tossed it in the trash.

" _Hmm_ what?" She dropped her arms and stepped towards him, unable to help herself. She peered over his shoulder, squinting at the chart.

"You're a thirty-two." He stripped the latex glove off and finally turned to her. "That's quite high. Above average."

"Above…?" She blinked, trying to make sense of the numbers and labels on the box. "Wait. _Wait._ What does that —"

"You're at the peak of your cycle." He leaned back against the counter, not quite meeting her eyes. His gaze hovered on a spot just above her shoulder. "We have a 24-hour window for conception, starting…now."

She paled. She stumbled back towards the wall, bracing herself against it. Her head swam. Her temples throbbed.

 _Twenty-four hours for conception._

 _Twenty-four hours._

 _Twenty-four..._

He reached out to her…but stopped when she shirked his attempt.

They stared at each other, her eyes burning with unshed tears, and rage, and _hatred_ as the meaning of his words sunk in. When it all became too strange, he mercifully looked away.

"You'll need time to prepare, I'm sure." He took a deep breath and shook his wrist out, glancing once more at the time. "I'll come to you tonight. At ten."

Her nostrils flared with each labored breath she took. She trembled, her whole body quivering.

 _It couldn't be real. It couldn't. None of it could be real..._

"Ms. Redfield?" he asked, his hand on the door knob.

She looked up in his direction. Unseeing. Unfocused.

He paused, turning his gaze away from her. "It's ugly business, I know. I'll make an effort to be efficient," he said softly.

It was somehow _worse_ to hear him feign concern. To hear him speak in a voice with gentle edges. To hear him call it _ugly business._

His plan to rape her pregnant.

The bathroom door shut behind him, firm and final.

And she was left alone with her rage…and her terror.

* * *

 _ **April 14, 2009**_

His footsteps echoed as he strode down the steel corridor, making his way towards the lower deck of the ship.

Thirty-seven days.

Thirty-seven days since Africa, with scorched red earth beneath his boots and the blistering white sun overhead.

Thirty-seven days since The End had begun.

 _And what slow, dragging days they had been._ The End had not struck quickly, or sharply, or like a burst of blinding flame. It had settled on civilization like silt on a riverbed. Sand sinking into cracks, trickling down the throat, filling the lungs inch by inch.

The End was a death rattle. A desperate, dying gasp, thirty-seven days long.

The halls were silent that evening. All around him, wood creaked and metal rattled, shifting with the rolling waves. _It was strange,_ he thought as he walked lower and lower, down towards the belly of the ship. A few weeks ago, all he wanted was silence. He craved it desperately, wildly. An end to the chaos teeming all around him.

An end to the _noise._

And now he had it. More than enough of it. He had long, empty halls, and shadowed rooms with low golden lights. He had damp air, and the heavy echo of his boots, and the groaning, the constant damned _groaning_ of the ship…

And nothing but his thoughts, rushing and tumbling over one another. Filling the space the chaos had left behind.

He made his way through the door to the lowest deck, the salt-rusted hinges straining in protest as he pushed against them.

He blinked against the rush of light, a stark shade of blue. The walls glimmered and rippled with eerie liquid patterns.

This room smelled different than the rest...no salt, no brine, no damp wood. Instead, it was filled with the bitter, sterile scent of cryogenic fluid.

Ten chambers were lined up in two neat rows, against either wall.

Ten people slept, peaceful and content. The survivors of The End. Thoroughly oblivious to the way civilization crumbled, miles and miles away.

There was something comforting about this place, though he was reluctant to admit it. There was a low hum to the room - not just from the equipment, but it seemed to radiate a kind of energy, where the rest of the ship felt desolate and barren. Down here, beneath the dark waters, hearts pumped blood, and lungs filtered air, and minds, though numbed to unconsciousness, flickered with electricity.

It felt warm here.

It felt _alive_ here.

And he found himself drawn to that source of heat and light, night after night. A sad, desperate moth, fluttering frantically, reaching for excuses. _Checking pulse readings, checking fluid retention, checking things that had already been checked twice over..._

Tonight, he found Jill hunched over one of the chambers, face cast in a pale glow. Her hair hung in lifeless blonde strands, brushing against the curved glass, and her lips were slightly parted as if she were in the middle of a sentence.

She didn't look up when he entered. Or when he turned to close the door behind him. Or when he walked towards her, and stopped at her side, and looked down at the subject inside - Redfield, his eyes closed, his features slack with sleep.

He glanced at the monitor to the side of the chamber. Normal readings. A thin green line spiking and dipping in rhythm with the man's heartbeat.

"They're all stable?" he asked, watching as Jill's eyes flitted over the serene face beneath the glass, following a trail of bubbles making their way up the tube.

She nodded once. Her lips were pressed tight, a thin, pale line.

"Electrolyte levels?"

Another nod. She rested her fingertips against the curved glass, her face held in a careful, stoic mask.

He turned away, glancing down the row of chambers. His eyes landed on Kennedy, his head tilted slightly to the side as if he'd fallen asleep against the window during a long car ride. On Redfield's young BSAA partner, her features refusing to relax from her displeased scowl. On Redfield's sister, unruly wisps of copper curls drifting around messily.

"Keep a close eye on Birkin," he said, taking a few steps away from Redfield's pod. "I don't trust that she'll regulate as well as-"

"Okay."

He turned back towards Jill. It was the first word she'd spoken since the morning. Or since yesterday. Or since the day before that, perhaps...while he controlled the ship's environment with an unrelenting precision, he found the hours had begun bleeding together. Sunrises and sunsets and dim days and dark nights.

He hadn't heard her voice in quite some time. It cracked around the word.

A sharp, pointed word.

"Is there a problem?" He narrowed his eyes, watching as she trailed her fingertips along the pod. The glass squeaked beneath her skin.

"I'll check her later," she answered, hand falling to her side. "She's fine."

He watched as she turned and walked away, the sound of her footsteps muffled by the dull buzz of the equipment. By the softly beeping monitors.

By the low, endless moaning of the ship. A haunting noise he felt deep in his bones.

* * *

 _ **July 2, 2009**_

"This is crazy." Josh turned the page of an old newspaper. "This is batshit crazy."

From across the table, Claire squinted at the date in the top right corner of what he was reading: _June 15th, 2009._

On the beach, frothy waves rolled in and out, and the sun sank into the ocean behind a curtain of pink and gold.

Sheva crunched on another chip and wiped her fingertips on a napkin. The smell of salt and vinegar burned Claire's nose; she turned her head.

"Moscow…the entire city of Moscow…fell in a _week?"_ Josh asked incredulously, looking up at Jill.

She nodded to him. There was a bowl of untouched Ramen in front of her.

Claire watched her through the steam rising up from the noodles. She realized she couldn't quite remember the sound of the woman's voice - Jill was so solemn now. So solemn, and so quiet, and so _empty..._

There were…things Claire wanted to ask her. Things she'd need to pull her aside for. She was sure Jill would know the answers. Jill would know - most likely, _probably_ \- what it was to be with him, to feel his hands on her body..to be _raped_ by him. She blanched at the word, feeling a lump rise in her throat. Her fingers curled around the edge of the table.

Jill had been with him for years. He must have…at some point…

Maybe that was why she didn't talk now.

Maybe it wasn't The End that ruined her.

Maybe he had destroyed her before The End began.

"What is it?" Jill asked, and the sudden strangeness of her half-whispered words startled Claire.

She took a deep breath and blinked. "What?"

"You were looking at me. You seem upset."

She hesitated. "No, I'm...I'm fine." She nodded for emphasis.

Jill narrowed her hollow blue eyes.

At the end of the table, Sheva and Josh prattled on about the city that wasn't Moscow anymore.

"Hey," Claire said. She licked her lips, wind-whipped and sunburnt. "Can I…can we talk someplace?"

* * *

 _ **April 23, 2009**_

"You need to eat."

Jill sat across from Wesker, staring down at her untouched plate of alfredo - limp, pale noodles, and lumpy sauce made from a box she'd found in the pantry. She poked at a gelatinous clump with her fork, ignoring him.

The television behind her showed nothing but snow. A robotic voice spoke between the screech of emergency codes.

"National state of emergency...US Department of Defense has issued...contagious disease...mandatory curfews imposed...warning effective until further notice…"

Live broadcasting from the States had gone silent nearly a week ago. The alert played on a loop now, occasionally broken up by the static of the weakening signal.

"You haven't eaten in two days," he pressed, growing more irritated. Between her bulletproof silence and the shrill, piercing emergency message, he was certain his nerves were frayed beyond repair.

"I'm not hungry," Jill finally said. Her answer was clipped short. She dropped her fork, and it clattered against the plate.

He leaned back in his chair, inhaling sharply, closing his eyes. He fought the urge to raise a hand and massage his temples at the rising pressure. He supposed he could force-feed her, if she refused to cooperate...or he could work to repair the P30 device, now just a tangle of tubes and needles…

But this was no silent rebellion. This was no defiant stand against him, against his plan. She had walked alongside him each step of the way, terse and tense…

...and now she seemed drained. Simply drained. Pale and limp, fading a little more each day. She snapped at him every so often, or glared, or bristled. Little bursts of rage that seemed to awaken her.

Otherwise, she wilted.

She stood abruptly, the table rattling as she pushed away. She turned towards the door, leaving the plate full of food.

"Where are you going?" He narrowed his eyes on her as she crossed the room.

"To check on the others," she answered, not bothering to turn around. She passed through the door, slipping around the corner.

 _The others,_ who had just been checked two hours ago. If that. There had been no alerts, no reason to believe their condition was anything but stable. But he would find her there in an hour, or two, or three, illuminated by the eerie glow of the room. He'd find her staring down into the concave glass, watching the liquid bubble and flow, watching chests expand and compress, listening to the rhythm of the monitors.

He drummed his fingertips on the wood grain. The emergency message buzzed behind him.

They were both moths. Dull and brown and starving, drawn to the same unnatural source of light. They threw themselves against the glass again, and again, and again.

 _Desperate,_ he thought, rising from the table to follow her.

 _Futile,_ he thought, and the word snagged beneath his skin like a barbed hook.

* * *

 _ **July 2, 2009**_

They walked slowly together, Claire picking at a calico scallop shell she'd plucked from the shallow surf. They were painfully quiet; Claire had no idea how to ask, or _what_ to ask, or where to begin. She wondered if it was even worth asking.

There was a chance that no one would ever find out.

There was a chance - a _big_ chance - that it might not work.

Could he impregnate a human? Was that possible, this late in the game? Maybe not. Maybe he couldn't even —

"It's you, isn't it?" Jill's voice was raspy and deep.

"I'm… sorry?" Claire asked, feigning confusion.

"He's going to use you first," Jill said. She sounded strange - almost disappointed, or sad.

They stopped walking. The sand felt very cold under Claire's feet as the sun sank down into the ocean. She put her hands on her hips, tightening her fist around the shell, fighting the urge to cross her arms over her chest. Fighting the urge to run. Instead, she worried at the inside of her cheek.

Jill's eyes were so clear and hard that they barely seemed blue. They were glacial. She remembered the way they were years ago - a sparkling shade of crystal blue, lively and dynamic. Not at all like the empty ice that stared back at her now. Unblinking. Unfeeling.

When Claire couldn't stand it anymore, she turned and looked out to the horizon.

Jill stepped closer, and Claire felt her heat at her shoulder. Little foaming waves rolled up around their ankles and sank away again.

The early stirrings of tears tingled behind Claire's eyes. She squinted the sensation away. The rippled edges of the shell cut into her palm. She wouldn't cry. She wouldn't cry over this, over _him._ He would never make her cry; she wouldn't _give_ him that power.

Behind her, Jill sighed.

Claire threw her head back, dropping the shell, and laced her fingers behind her neck. A desperate, dejected sob pushed its way up her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth, the tears finally welling up and spilling over her hot cheeks.

"It won't be like that, Claire."

"Like how?" She wiped at her face with heel of her palms. Her hands trembled.

"It won't be that bad."

"Fuck you!" Claire nearly shouted. "He's going…" Her chest heaved, her words nearly slurring through her agony. "He's going to _rape_ me tonight and all you can come up with is some smug bullshit like ' _it won't be that bad'_? Really, Jill? That's all you got for me?" Her eyelashes were matted with tears.

"He won't rape you," she said quietly. "He won't hurt you."

Claire recoiled. "He won't…" She trailed off in disbelief. "He won't hurt _me_? Listen to yourself! Look at you!" She gestured wildly to Jill's chest. To the ring of puckered scars there - faded to a duller shade of pink and red, but still striking against her pale skin. Still angry, still raw.

Jill ignored the gesture, and stared at the setting sun, a hazy shade of scarlet hanging over the quiet ocean. She shook her head. "I think…maybe…it's all behind him now."

She sounded eerily distant when she spoke, as if her voice and her thoughts were coming from a thousand miles away.

She sounded hollow. Numb.

 _Used._

Claire couldn't hold back her sharp bark of a laugh, still half-choked with tears. It was absurd. It was all fucking _absurd._ Jill saying it was all _behind_ him now, while she stared out at the ocean like some kind of broken puppet with tangled strings and limp limbs. Tossed aside when he was finished. So Claire laughed - a mixture of fury, fear, sadness, everything - and the sound scratched her throat. "God, he just fuckin'...he _ruined_ you, didn't he, Jill?"

She was met with silence.

* * *

 _ **May 4, 2009**_

"I want to go under."

Wesker ignored her, or didn't hear her at all, his shining red eyes trained on the wall of monitors. He'd been sitting behind his great desk forever, it seemed, watching and waiting. The ship lurched and its steel belly groaned. An old styrofoam cup of coffee tumbled to the grated floor.

He didn't even notice.

One screen was a Japanese news channel - she recognized the colorful logo. The station had long since gone off the air and there was nothing left but static and the company's characters. Another screen blared out muddled and frantic German. Germany had held out better than its European cousins, and the occasional live broadcast flickered on and off the screen, an unsteady signal. Today, tonight, whenever…there was a live feed of a riot. The camera, jostled and unsteady, panned in on the blank and wide-eyed face of a man who had been trampled to death. A line of blood trickled from his open mouth.

"I want to go to sleep."

He sighed, a sound of heavy exasperation. "Then go to bed, Jill," he said flatly, still transfixed on the collapse of society, laid out before him on a patchwork of screens.

She took a step closer to him. "I need you to put me under."

He finally turned his glare on her. " _Put you under_?" He snapped.

She swallowed, and nodded.

He stared up at her. His glare deepened.

"No."

"Wesker—"

"No." He focused his attention on the screens again. "Unfortunately, I require your assistance in maintaining—"

"You have the infected...the majini. A hundred of them," she argued softly, her voice hoarse with disuse.

He slammed his fist down on the desk; dirty plates and bowls and utensils rattled, accumulated over the weeks he'd spent in morbid observation of humanity's last stand. Curiously, the force of his blow didn't reduce the desk to crumpled metal - something that would have happened just a few weeks ago. It only shook on its legs, and papers rustled, and the wooden floor creaked.

"I will _not_ …depend…on the aid...of the unworthy," he ground out between clenched teeth.

The truth of the matter, she knew, was that he had lost the majini. They had silently mutinized the month before, shortly after the night Excella had…

Jill's eyes cut away from Wesker, the last few months flashing and tangling across her memory.

One hundred and twenty-three of the infected had migrated from their assigned positions to the lower levels of the ship.

One hundred and twenty-three men and women were huddled below, waiting for landfall.

They didn't fear him anymore…and they certainly didn't need him.

He was no _god._

He was weak.

And without _her_ …his lowly little Jill Valentine, his marionette, his automaton...he would be very much alone.

"Will you put me to sleep...Sir?"

"You can repeat your _insipid_ request as much as you like!" he shouted, finally roused to standing. "I won't be swayed!"

She blinked slowly, her hollow gaze on his face. She took a centering breath. "Please. Captain."

He shook his head. "Oh, that's cheap," he sneered at her, his eyes narrowing. "Even for _you_ , Jill."

She stared at him a moment longer, the air around him seeming to tremble with his rage. A sight that would frighten anyone else. But after years of it, of _him,_ she nodded, her eyes drifting away.

"Go to bed," he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Go to bed, Miss Valentine…sleep well. You'll feel better in the morning."

She turned, as if to leave. But she didn't leave - instead, she stopped at the edge of the desk, picking up one of his discarded knives.

He watched as she considered the weight of it for a moment.

He watched as she schooled her features into a blank, empty mask.

 _Blank and empty._ Words that had defined her month after month. _Blank and empty._ Words that stretched endlessly before her. The blank, empty ocean all around them. The blank, empty world behind them. The blank, empty ship swallowing them up.

The blank, empty buzzing in her head.

Blank and empty and never the same again.

Without warning, seemingly without thought, she forcefully slashed at her right wrist - a sudden, violent movement.

The strangeness of it seemed to stun them both. He gaped at her where she stood, a glistening trail of red running down her pale flesh, pooling in her palm and painting rivulets down to her fingertips. Her forearm bled profusely from the jagged, clumsy wound. His eyes were wide with the horror she'd inflicted on body. His thin lips moved, twitched, as if he meant to speak - perhaps say her name: _Jill_.

She blinked at him, and then looked back down to her arm. She switched the knife to her bloody hand, preparing to —

He was on her in an instant, before she could take another breath. He held her bleeding arm in the air, his fingers squeezing so tightly around her wrist she was sure the bones were going to shatter like glass. She howled, a long, keening, mournful wail, and the knife fell to the metal floor.

"Let me go!" she begged, arching up, trying desperately to escape him. "Let me go…"

"Enough!" He bellowed, so close to her ear that her head throbbed with his baritone voice.

She collapsed against him, sinking to her knees, her strangled wrist still caught in his grasp. She clung to his pant leg, her skinny, sickly fingers twisting in the fabric. She buried her face in the heat of his thigh and wept.

She could feel him breathing - quick and shallow in his panic. Hot tears, so odd, so _foreign_ after years of chemically-induced apathy, rolled down her cold cheeks. She tried one last time to free her arm.

"Stop!" He barked, and she flinched.

After a few moments, his grip on her poor wrist softened. He cleared his throat and began again, quietly. "Stop. Let it clot."

They stayed that way for minutes. For hours. She didn't know. A slave on her knees before her master. Her arm grew numb, but the pulsing in the gash slowed and eventually stopped.

Just as Wesker took a steadying breath, and the tension in the captain's cabin seemed to ease, the deafening sound of electronic static crackled the air.

She started, turning her face against his leg so that she could see the wall of monitors.

Germany's broadcast had turned to snow.

The ship hummed and lurched… and there was nothing else.

"I'll put you to sleep with the others now, Jill," he whispered.

* * *

 _ **July 2, 2009**_

Claire skipped the group meeting that night, waving on Rebecca and Sheva as they passed her on her way back to her cabin. She kept her head down, doing her best to shield her reddened eyes from them as she forced a quick, tight smile for appearances. She heard their murmurings as they walked in the other direction, toward the resort clubhouse.

 _Is she alright?_

 _Are any of us alright?_

 _Yeah...fair enough..._

Claire shut the front door behind her, leaning heavily against it. She slid down to the floor, wrapping her arms around her legs.

They would all be there. Chris, Jill, Leon, Barry. The little family she'd known for years. They'd ask where she was, what was wrong. They'd talk about rations and inventories, about scouting expeditions, about repairs and maintenance and dividing up the next day's labor.

And they would all leave, heading towards their cabins for a comfortable night's sleep.

And she would be here.

Waiting for him to come to her.

Waiting for her life - what was left of it - to come crashing to a halt.

She stayed huddled against the door, her face buried in her knees, her thighs pressed to her chest, for what seemed a lifetime.

The clock above the enormous sofa chimed softly. It was meant to be melodic and comforting.

It sounded like a death knell.

One chime. Two. She felt the noise more than she heard it, metal striking hollow metal. It rattled through her joints and left her muscles aching.

Three. Four.

Her temples throbbed, and she closed her eyes tighter, curled into herself tighter.

Five.

She took a shaky breath. She focused on the smell of salt. Sand. Wood. Sweat. Unfamiliar things, wrong things. Things that shouldn't be in her world.

Six.

She was strong. She had been through worse. She was strong. Her jaw trembled, and she clenched her hand tight, and her nails bit into the skin of her palm, and she told herself she was _strong-_

Seven chimes.

Claire screamed then, pounding her fists against the woodgrain until blood dripped from her knuckles.

She didn't feel the pain.

* * *

Wesker gripped the side of the sink and stared at himself in the gilded bathroom mirror. He lifted his left arm to glance at his watch.

 _9:36._

He flipped the handle of the golden faucet up. Warm water poured from the spigot like a bubbling fountain. He let it run into his cupped hands and splashed his face.

He would go to her very soon. Lay with her. Hopefully put a child in her womb on the first try. Their timing could not be more exact; there was such a narrow window for conception, and he had found the way to squeeze through.

 _How strange._

 _Claire Redfield. The most compatible out of them all._ He would never have imagined _her_ ; the little sister who always hovered on the edges of her beloved brother's story. The girl Chris fought to protect, begged to save. He couldn't have written a revenge so perfect.

 _It would be very clinical. Very clean._ He had decided it the moment he'd run her panel and found it favorable against his. _He would bring himself to hardness, and then to brink of crisis…a quick insertion, no more than a few seconds. No stroking, no unnecessary touching, nothing like that._

 _Not for her dignity, no…but for his._

He looked up into his own eyes, and watched his pupils contract until they were nothing but slits beneath the hard vanity lights. Slowly, he tilted his head and examined his wet skin. He traced the very edge of his hairline with a finger.

His hair was lightening from the days spent outside, working near the intense reflection of the ocean; it was nearly white now. There was a sunspot emerging on one of his sharp cheekbones, just under his eye socket. He was returning to something of a mortal state in the absence of the PG-67 A/W.

 _Things change so quickly_ , he thought. He was softer, slower, simpler...and the devolution had seemingly taken no time at all. He was surprised that it neither disturbed nor enraged him.

But when it was over…when the girl's pregnancy was assured…he would resume his regular doses of the serum. He would ascend once again.

And things would be as they were always meant to be.

His gaze traveled lower, over his throat, his collar bone. He paused and pressed his fingertips to a small scar on his bare chest. It was all that was left of the events before his rebirth in Raccoon City. One mark - one stubborn, defiant patch of skin that refused to heal in sync with the rest of his body. Pale and smooth.

He stood very still, mesmerized by the old wound. He barely breathed. He could still remember the pain...the last intense, crippling pain he had felt. He could remember the way it seared through his chest. The way his skin ripped and his muscles tore. The way his body seemed to disintegrate, unravel, and the way the world bled to black…

And then he awoke.

And he was new.

And the mark had never left him.

Several hard knocks startled him out of his reverie. His hand fell from his chest. He slapped the faucet off and yanked a hand towel down from a rack.

"Who is it?" he snapped, peering out from the bathroom.

"Take a guess, _asshole_."

His jaw clenched. He stormed to the door, fumbling with the sliding lock, and then the deadbolt. He threw it open and came face to face with Claire.

"I told you I would come to _you_ , Ms. Redfield," he hissed, wrenching her inside by her arm.

"Don't touch me!" She struggled with him as he pulled her into the villa. She tore her arm free, cradling it as if he'd burned her.

He looked out the door down the empty boardwalk - left and right - and then finally closed it, locking them in.

He turned to her, glaring. "Did anyone see you?"

She glared back, still rubbing her arm where he'd grabbed her. "No. Jesus Christ."

"I said _ten_. In _your_ cabin," he hissed.

She rolled her eyes. "Wrecked your plans? Showing up a whole twenty minutes early?" She looked around, crossing her arms over her chest. "What were you doing? Gussying up for my rape?" She jerked her head towards the bathroom as she spoke. "Really thoughtful of you."

He snorted, his lip curling. "You're just like your _imbecile_ brother. The both of you - unending idiocy."

"Oh…fuck… _off,_ Wesker," she drawled, her eyes rolling to the ceiling.

He smelled the air, his nose wrinkling at the sting of alcohol. "How much have you had to drink?"

"Not enough for this shit." She looked at him boldly, and he knew she was trying very hard to appear…tough. She wavered, wobbling on her own feet even as she tried to stand still.

"You're inebriated," he said, frowning.

Unashamed, she pinched her thumb and forefinger together. "A little." She reached for the hem of her tank top and began pulling it up. "Where're we going here? Couch?"

He watched her. He watched her bare the swath of smooth, pale flesh of her flat midriff…the smattering of brown freckles coming to a point at her small, protruding navel. He blinked and took a breath, licking his lips. "Stop."

She managed to get her top off and stood before him in only a black sports bra. She balled the shirt in her hands. Her hair was thrown back in a messy ponytail; curls of golden-red sprung up all over her head. "You ready?" She belched into the crook of her elbow. "Come on. Let's get this show on the road." She clapped her hands together sharply, and nodded at him, eyeing his clothes. She began to work on the fly of her shorts.

She stopped when his hand closed over her wrist - as gently as he could manage.

She looked up at him.

He raised his eyebrows and then said, very slowly: "Claire."

" _No_ ," she argued, and stumbled away. "I'm not waiting. Now or never."

He narrowed his reptilian eyes at her.

"What?" she snarled.

His scowl flitted to her raw knuckles.

Like a child, she hid her hands behind her back, out of his sight.

"What have you done to yourself?" he asked, his voice flat.

"What the hell do you care?" she shot back. And then she paused, time seeming to stand still between them. She took a deep, shaky breath.

Wesker's face fell in exasperation. "Are you going to be sick?"

" _No_ ," she cut him off. She wheezed and hesitated, and then bent over. Her bruised fingers clawed at her knees. "I just…I just need a sec."

* * *

He stood in the bathroom doorway, leaning on the frame.

She'd been slumped over his bidet for the better part of fifteen minutes. She spat into the bowl, breathing heavily. "I can't," she said, her words echoing around the porcelain basin.

"You must." He let his head rest against the cool wood, listening to her groan.

"Can you turn that light off?"

He didn't move.

"Fucking _please_?!" she cried wetly, a thick rope of saliva dripping into the bidet.

He reached across the doorway and casually flicked the vanity lights off. He tested the other switches, leaving on the fan and the dim shower globe.

"God…" She hid her face in the crook of her arm.

"Better to get it over with," he said, closing his eyes.

"I can't."

"You can."

She moaned, sweating profusely, her skin glistening in the strange yellow light from the corner of the bathroom. "I just wanna throw up," she whispered.

He ran his hand through his hair and crouched down next to her. She flinched. "Use your fingers," he suggested.

She looked at him, horrified. "No!"

"You've spent a lifetime fighting monsters, Ms. Redfield. Gagging yourself really shouldn't be _this_ dramatic."

Her eyes watered and her chin quivered. She looked absolutely _pitiful._

He sighed. She was growing more intoxicated by the minute; he wondered if she'd had enough to poison herself.

"I hate it here," she said, and he could hear the spit in her mouth. "I hate it...so...so much."

He furrowed his brow in mock interest, her words barely registering as he considered his next step.

"I just…I hate you. I hate you...more than _anything._ You're so…fucking…fucking…" She stared at him, her eyes hazy as she lost her train of thought. "You're just… _disgusting_ and —"

Her reflexes were so delayed that she didn't even resist the hand on the back of her neck, directing her over the bidet, and two fingers of the other hand slipping into her mouth, over her soft tongue, past her teeth, which wisely did not bite down. He touched the back of her slimy throat, his nails barely scratching the wet flesh there. He felt her entire body jerk as soon as he made contact.

He pulled away in time for her vomit, unobstructed. What seemed to be an entire bottle of red wine, and nothing else, splashed into the bowl. He shook out his hand and grimaced.

She sobbed between agonized moans. Her expression was a twist of shock, and pain, and something like betrayal at his deception.

And perhaps a bit of relief.

He carefully brushed her ponytail aside. "A little more, hmm?"

"I'm _fine_." She pushed at him and gulped, shivering even in the oppressive heat. "I'm done."

"I don't think so." His hand was guiding her again by nape of her neck.

"No," she keened. "Please, no…" Her bloodied fingers clung to the lip of the bidet, her arms tense and straight with her fear.

Despite her protests, her caterwauling, her white-knuckled grip...she ultimately _let_ him open up her body again.

And he knew she would never admit it, but the very small, rational part of her must have been grateful.

* * *

 _"Miss Redfield."_

She shifted and frowned, nuzzling deeper into the pillow.

 _"Miss Redfield."_

The disembodied voice again. More insistent. _What a strange dream_ , she thought in her haze of half-awakeness. A dream about the world crumbling down around her. A dream about arriving in a quiet little paradise, far away from the chaos. A dream about her friends, all safe, all together...and the bargain that was struck to keep them that way…

She turned over, wrapping the sheet more tightly around herself, her eyes screwed shut to keep the bright morning sun out.

" _Claire!_ " The voice was clear and loud that time.

She sat nearly straight up, gasping, and when she saw him standing over her, she recoiled, pressing herself flat against the back of the couch. Her chest heaved. She pushed her hair out of her face.

"Where am I?" she asked, wide-eyed and shaking.

He was cradling a tea cup and just… _looking_ at her.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee was thick and nauseating in the villa. She coughed as her stomach churned, and wiped her mouth with the back of her trembling hand. Her head _pounded_. Her foot bumped against a decorative ceramic bowl on the floor next to the couch, thankfully empty. _How many times had she thrown up?_ "What time is it?"

"It's time for me to join the others…and for you to get dressed," he said, dismissively. He went to the kitchenette and set the teacup on the countertop.

She pulled the sheet up to her chest, covering her sports bra. Her face and throat flushed hotly. She looked around his cabin then, her mind still torn between theoretical trust and mortal terror in his presence. Her eyes drifted to a familiar dark face with yellow eyes. Her traitorous black cat - who she'd shared her little apartment with for years before The End, who had, at some point during her months-long sleep, become _his_ cat - sat on a shelf inside the great bureau in the farthest corner of the room. It licked its paw lazily. She glared at it.

And then her attention went to his bed. A big, beautiful, white-dressed four-poster, like the one in her suite; it was unmade. She swallowed, her nostrils flaring.

"Did we…"

"No," he replied curtly.

Her body sagged in relief. She reached for her tank top, laid over the arm of the couch. She winced at her stiffness, her back cracking in protest. "What do we do now?"

" _We_ aren't going to do anything," he sneered, patting down the pockets in his cargo shorts. " _You_ will put your clothes on and leave in twenty minutes." He paused to glance at her. "Discreetly."

He was searching for something, walking into the kitchen and back out again, his quick, angry eyes darting around the villa. "I shouldn't have to remind you of what is at stake here for your friends and family, Ms. Redfield."

She glowered at him, squinting in the column of warm, tropical light that fell through his bay windows.

"And now you've wasted an entire cycle with your… _tricks_." He snatched his sunglasses off a bedside table and unfolded the arms, readying them. "It will be at least four weeks until we can attempt this again."

She stood, shedding the bedsheet. "You said 24 hours."

He blinked at her, and she saw how he fought not to let his eyes slip down to her chest. "I did. Yes," he said haltingly.

"It hasn't been 24 hours. We can still do it." She tossed her shirt behind her and squared her shoulders.

He seemed almost to smile at her bravery. "No."

"Yes."

"Ms. Redfield —"

"Now. Before they notice we're both missing," she said, and her voice, surprisingly, did not waver.

He took a deep breath and rubbed the back of his neck, staring at her. She imagined the gears turning in his head. He looked ill.

After a moment had passed, he shrugged to signal his tired consent.

"I need Listerine or something," she mumbled and turned towards the bathroom.

"Why? I am absolutely not ki—"

"Because I can only taste vomit!" she barked at him.

He stiffened. "The medicine cabinet. And don't you dare put your lips on it."

* * *

He slowly sat on the edge of the enormous bed and turned his sunglasses end-over-end on his thigh. His heart, the disobedient wretch that it was, thundered in his chest. His blood felt as if it were running too hot or too thick or too fast, and he uselessly willed it to stop pounding, but it would not, it _could_ not.

Behind the bathroom door, he heard the muffled sound of the toilet flushing.

He found it difficult to breathe, and although he hadn't eaten, he felt as if there was something lodged in his throat, choking him.

The faucet ran.

 _What was it that had him so thoroughly unnerved?_ he wondered. _Cessation of the boosters, perhaps? Or something else...the newness, the wildness of this place? The claustrophobia of being trapped with the idiots he'd have happily left for dead?_

He tossed the sunglasses back on the side table and rubbed his hands together, frowning at the clammy, sticky feel of his own skin. His knee bounced anxiously.

Claire Redfield would be the first to bring forth the new generation. The first to put his plan into action. The first to secure his ascension. His _return._

And though he had known - somewhat abstractly - what that _plan_ would entail, his stomach dropped as he realized what was required of him.

The joy he had felt at such perfect, accidental revenge was all but gone in anticipation of the very real act.

And against his thigh, his willful cock was furiously... _humiliatingly..._ harder than it had been in years. It was due in part to the lack of the PG-67 A/W, he was sure. Every cell in his body slowly reverting back it's repulsive human state…his wants becoming desperate, vile _needs_.

He stared at himself, disbelieving; his shorts were stretched treasonously over his groin, which positively throbbed, engorged with blood. He felt light-headed, a pressure building in his body that he hadn't experienced in over a decade.

And all because of _her_.

The thought of her...the thought of the freckles on her chest, the constellation of them he had seen so much of the night before as he helped her to the couch, laid her down, and watched the pleasing sway of her breasts. He'd been fascinated by the way the flirtatious little spots seemed painted on her pale skin, how they disappeared beneath the black sports bra, and emerged again, coming to a perfect point above her navel, like a compass, beckoning _this way_... And her stomach - taut and smooth; the dim light catching the fine peach fuzz on her lower belly.

His rebellious body fairly hummed with the promise of touching her.

Mortified, he ground his teeth.

 _Why did it have to be her? Whywhywhy…_

The bathroom door opened.

He blanched.

She flipped the light switch off and walked down the little hallway to the main room, her bare feet silent on the bamboo floors. She stopped there, on the threshold, picking at her nails. They stared at each other.

He forced himself to stand. Not knowing what to do with his hands, he stuffed them deeply into the pockets of his shorts. He realized, suddenly, that she could easily see the tented outline of his turncoat arousal, and for the first time in years…he blushed.

 _Would she see?_

 _Would she_ see… _stop sniveling,_ he chided his own thoughts.

 _Pathetic._

 _Disgusting._

 _Pull yourself together._

He squared his shoulders, and straightened his spine. _Clinical and clean,_ he reminded himself, urging the flush of blood to leave his face, his neck, his chest. _Clinical and clean._

There was nothing to think about. There was nothing to worry about. It was a simple biological act, and one that came naturally to all creatures. One that would be over quickly. His body - though it hadn't been touched in years, though it felt as if his insides might burst from his too-tight skin - would respond exactly as he needed it to. Exactly as he _willed_ it too.

 _Clinical and clean._ A kind of mantra he repeated over and over, trying futilely to push any thoughts of freckles and peach fuzz to the far corners of his mind.

It was much too late to worry about hiding his cock, so he falsified his pride and simply held her gaze, challenging her to make the first move.

She cleared her throat and crossed her arms. "I think you've gotta…unzip…at least. For this to work, I mean."

He opened his mouth to say something - a clever retort, a snort, a laugh…anything at all. But no sound would come out. He looked down then, watching his hands as they worked of their own volition, unbuttoning the fly and then peeling the zipper open in slow motion. His boxer-briefs showed blue plaid through the _v_ of his undone shorts. He smoothed over the front, making sure the panels of soft material stayed in place over his defiant erection.

 _Clinical and clean._

She stood very still in exactly the same spot she had the night before, and gnawed at her thumbnail.

The cat watched them both, its yellow stare volleying back and forth, impassive.

 _Breathe_ , _you fool_ , he thought to himself, and swallowed. He toed out of his tennis shoes, one at time, and then nudged them away. He gestured to the pile of pillows and sheets.

She went to the other side of the bed. They did not look at each as they climbed in, lifting the light comforter together and sliding under it with unsettling choreography. He eased back with a deep breath, laying his head on an overstuffed pillow and staring straight up at the mosquito netting above them; he felt her do the same.

The villa was already unbearably hot in the morning sun; it would only grow more humid and heavy as the day wore on. The back of his neck was damp with perspiration. He listened to call of sea birds flying over the water, listened to the waves lap at the pilings beneath the cabin.

He was afraid to move, and he hated himself for it...and he hated her more.

Beside him, the mattress shifted and dipped with whatever she was doing. He snuck a careful glance at her from the corner of his eye. She sighed as she fidgeted under the covers. She lifted her hips and arched up, whatever she was fussing with kept out of sight.

With every movement, the comforter brushed against his groin and made him wince. Each drag of the fabric felt amplified against his skin. Each individual thread felt like a needle scratching along a membrane that was too thin, too delicate. Too _sensitive._ He was suddenly made of nothing but exposed, aching nerves, and he clenched his teeth tighter. _Tighter._ It was beyond agitating - the pull of the sheets, the rustling of her movement, the way she shimmied and the way the bed bowed beneath her and the damned _comforter,_ the unbearable, featherlight friction that wasn't enough, that wouldn't end-

"What are you doing?" he managed to snap, his voice cracking.

She contracted to a tight ball under the blanket and turned her head on the pillow to glare at him. "What do you think I'm doing?"

She straightened her legs out again and then dropped something onto the hardwood floor. He heard metal _ping_ against the surface.

 _Her shorts. Her jean shorts._

 _She had taken off her shorts._

He blinked and looked up, his hands balling in the fitted sheet, his very _being_ trying to sink into the bedding - sink down through the mattress and the box springs and the frame and then through the floor, sink forever until he was free of her, of the island, of existence.

The comforter rasped the underside of his barely-clothed cock once more and his stomach muscles clenched painfully in response. He was close - he was _too_ close, so close that the entire endeavor would be over before it started. He licked his lips and his fingers tightened in the sheet.

"We must do this _now_ , Ms. Redfield," he said, trying desperately to keep his voice even when he wanted to howl.

She stared at him blankly. And then a look of understanding washed over her face…followed closely by anger. " _Oh, come on_ ," she growled at him, pushing herself up to hands and knees, yanking the covers with her. "Jesus Christ…"

He screwed his eyes shut, desperate to block out the image that had already burned itself into his brain - Claire Redfield, the comforter wrapped around her bare waist, crawling over him so that she could take him inside of her.

She straddled his hips, squeezing his thighs closed with her own. The mattress shifted as she planted her hands on either side of his arms and brought her pelvis to his, as if she was lining up a driver. Through his clothes, he could feel the coolness of her on his overheated flesh.

"You're not gonna come if I touch you, are you? I have to… pull it out," she said, sitting back on her heels. The disgust in her voice was palpable.

His eyes shot open and he grabbed her offending hand before it had an opportunity to snake down between them. "Let me," he hissed. He looked up and studied the blue tray ceiling through the netted canopy; he looked anywhere but her eyes, or her face, or her body, as he pushed aside fabric of his boxers and set himself free.

There was nothing but the sound of the waves then, and their collective breath held tight in their lungs. A second, or a year, or a century passed in their deafening stillness.

He very nearly gulped, his unblinking gaze trained firmly on crown moulding. "Is there a problem?" he asked, the words like acid in his mouth.

"I have the right to _look_ at it before you put it in me, don't I?"

His jaw clenched, and he worried for a moment that he might break all of his teeth.

In the very edge of his vision, he saw her shift and rewrap the comforter around them both so that the lower extremities of their bodies were hidden from view. She leaned over him again, her fire-red hair falling over one of her speckled shoulders and tickling his throat.

"Hold it up," she said quietly.

He was so embarrassingly hard that he didn't need the support, but he squeezed the base of his cock, staving off the flow of blood and premature ejaculation as best he could. His chest burned, reminding him to breathe, and he took in air as if he was drowning.

She brought one hand to her mouth, and he knew she was spitting on her fingers, improvising a lubricant. She reached beneath the comforter and rubbed herself with her own saliva, her knuckles grazing his.

And then, with a practiced dexterity, her hands were reaching out, bracing herself against the headboard. He felt her tilting her hips, adjusting her angle above him. Her hair swept across his throat, his face, catching on his lower lip. He didn't dare move to brush it away.

And she began to lower herself onto him.


	2. A Poor Liar

**Chapter Two: A Poor Liar**

 _"In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost."_

 _-Dante Alighieri, "Inferno"_

 _ **March 13, 2009**_

His hands felt clammy on her skin.

It was hard to focus. Her bedframe squeaked, and her back ached, and rain pounded against the apartment windows. Distant lightning split the black sky.

Neil hadn't shaved. It had been two days, maybe three. His stubble scraped against her cheek, against her neck, as his lips carved a desperate trail down her skin.

It grated at her.

She curled her hands to fists in the sheets, turning her face towards the wall.

"Fuck," he breathed, and his breath was hot in her ear. Hot and damp. The fingers of his left hand dug into the skin of her hip. He rose, tilting his pelvis, drawing her closer as he thrust deeper between her legs.

 _Fuck_ was all he said.

 _Fuck_ with cheap tequila on his tongue, sharp and sickening. She could taste it when he kissed her. It tasted like college. Tasted like rough, early mornings. Tasted like mistakes. Desperation.

Running.

Stumbling.

He arched his back, and he pumped into her, and her eyes traced a scratch on the wall. Old, yellowed wood peeked out beneath the powdery grey paint.

They'd fucked here a dozen times. Two dozen. She'd pulled him down to the bed by the collar of his shirt. He'd carried her in when she was drunk and stumbling. They'd rolled towards each other in the soft blue-black hours of early morning and done something that didn't feel like _fucking_ at all.

But this was different.

This was empty. This was red-rimmed eyes, and scratchy throats, and sweaty palms. Dark, humid room. Hurried footsteps upstairs, and furniture dragging across the floor. A dog barking threateningly down the street.

The television on in the living room, casting a glow down the hallway.

She strained to hear the muffled voice of the CNN reporter. The words were lost as Neil's skin slapped against her own. A wet, ripe sound. It made her sick.

She craned her neck further, twisting beneath him. He groaned. She ground her teeth.

It had been two weeks since the news came from Africa. Kijuju had fallen. The continent was splitting, fraying at the seams. Thousands dead. Thousands more dying. Thousands infected.

No word from Chris.

No word from him for days. And the virus kept spreading, hour by hour, mile by mile. A ticking stopwatch she couldn't read the time on.

 _This was wrong. This was all wrong. He'd pulled her into bed. It was supposed to be passionate, desperate, their last chance. She should have been sinking her fingers into his skin. She should have been memorizing the contour of every muscle. She should have been crying his name with tears on her cheeks, holding him like he was the only fucking thing left to hold in the world-_

"Look at me," Neil whispered. His hand rose from her hip, resting against her cheek. The pads of his fingers were rough. He lifted his hand higher, tangling it in her hair, and her scalp ached as he pulled.

She'd liked it the first time he did it. A lifetime ago.

 _Look at me._

His hips bucked again as he slipped out of her - too much K-Y. Her thighs were greasy.

 _Fuck. Look at me._

He moved sluggishly, like a thick fog curled around him, clinging to his limbs.

 _After days of turmoil, desperate pleas from Cairo have gone silent. Borders in the Middle East remain closed, and officials fear-_

She knew what she'd see, if she turned her head. She'd been watching him for twenty minutes now. His eyes were hollow and glassy. His face was sallow, sunken. He stared down at her in a way she couldn't name - lost, hungry, only half-himself.

He looked haunted.

It was how anyone would look, if they watched the world slip between their fingers, and crumble out from under them. She imagined she had the same look on her own face. She'd been avoiding mirrors.

He mounted an erratic rhythm, pounding deeper into her, and she half-heartedly lifted her hips towards his. His breath hitched. His lips found the dip of her collarbone, and his tongue felt slick, sticky.

She felt numb beneath him.

"Claire," he moaned into her neck, into the tumble of her sweat-soaked hair. His body tensed and shivered. "Please."

The television cut to footage of gunfire. The sound of it echoed through the living room. A man screamed. The light flashed white and red and white again, reflecting off the hallway floorboards.

Her mouth tasted like copper.

"Christ, just look at me. Please." The words cracked as he spoke.

She closed her eyes as he came.

* * *

 _ **July 3, 2009**_

Wesker felt heat. Pleasant, pulsing heat. Skin against the tip of his cock - skin like velvet, barely brushing as she sunk down a fraction of an inch. An agonizing, aching inch, enveloping the sensitive head of his shaft. She was hardly dripping, but she was warm, and soft, and the pressure made his breath hitch...and he set his jaw, staring into the blank middle distance, his hands like claws digging into the bed.

She stopped.

She held herself above him, _around_ him, her thighs trembling with tension.

"Is your dick gonna do anything weird?" she asked. "Tell me now."

He nearly sat up, meeting her great blue eyes with a glare.

She looked down at him, unfazed. "I had to ask."

And then, she was rolling her hips - slight, barely perceptible movements, taking a bit more of his body into her own with every pass. He stared at the ceiling through the gauzy tent and counted each motion, counted every stir of her hips like he counted every wave of the tide as it washed over his feet. She was cooler than him by at least fifteen degrees, and while she wasn't exactly _wet_ , she wasn't dry either. Once the entire length of him was fitted tightly, safely in the strange space of her, it felt unnatural and familiar to him at the same time; their joining was violating and pleasurable, and the competing sensations confused him.

She let go of a rush of breath when their pubic bones bumped together, the final inch of his cock buried. And then she stared down at him, wide-eyed, as if she couldn't believe what was happening.

In truth…his expression probably mirrored hers - a sort of stunned resignation. He knew he most likely felt strange to her - with his temperature running so high, perhaps his penis felt like a hot poker in her belly - he didn't know, he _couldn't_ know; he hadn't had intercourse with anyone after The Change.

He turned his face away and tried to focus on the blue sky that stretched, dizzying and endless, over the blue water. _Clinical and clean. Quick and sterile. Clinical and..._

Slowly, agonizingly so, she lifted her hips, and slid back down. Perhaps accidentally, or maybe reflexively, she pressed her palms to his chest and spread her fingers. He glanced at her. She wrenched her hands away from him as if he'd struck her for the contact. There was another tentative roll of her hips, and then she put her hands the headboard, so that she was leaning over him, and her breasts, still restrained in the infernally taunting bra, were very close to his face.

He begin to take quick, trembling breaths, and no matter how hard he tried to conceal it, he knew she could hear him, feel him between her tensing thighs, falling apart _beneath_ her.

"How fast can you come?" she whispered.

He suddenly wished more than anything that he had taken the lead then, that he had climbed on top of _her_ and been the one to penetrate, dominate. But he was paralyzed by his fear of an act he hadn't committed in so long, and he'd lain passively beneath her, letting her body _consume_ his.

And then…he felt _it_.

Her single, unnecessary comment dismantled his bitter arousal; his erection was slipping away with each retreating pump of his blood. He held his breath. _Goddamn her._

The entire experience had reached its humiliating anti-climax, robbing him of what little dignity he had left on that god-forsaken island. Angrily, his self-control rushing back with the loss of his _appetite_ , he glared at her.

"Wha-" she stammered, feeling him grow soft. "No…no no no. _Don't_ ," she pleaded.

"It's over," he growled. "Get off me."

"No. We're _not_ doing this again," she replied through gritted teeth.

She pushed him to the bed then, and rode him hard through several rough thrusts - no more testing pelvic rolls, no more gentle insertion. He grunted, shocked, and sank into the pillows under her force. Unthinking, his hands found her hips, hidden under the comforter bunched around the place where their bodies met. He nearly gasped at the feel of her skin, smooth and cool beneath the searing heat of his palms. He looked down at his arms, disappearing in the folds of the blanket, in disbelief at his wayward hands and the flesh yielding to his touch.

She rolled her hips again and he felt the powerful muscles of her thighs contract around his.

"Come on," she said to him, to herself. "Don't let it go...come on." She ground her pelvis to his and a drop of sweat beaded on her scalp, rolled down the bridge of her imperfect nose, and fell to his throat. He watched her work above him, stupefied and silent, barely cognizant of his own role in the scene. Her brilliant blue eyes were squeezed shut, and she humped his body with such determination, such drive, every bit of her admirably trained on the goal of keeping him hard enough to follow the damn thing through completion.

Her efforts though, no matter how impressive, were in vain; he stayed embarrassingly fat and soft inside of her.

She slowed and then eventually stopped her ministrations, leaning back, her speckled shoulders sagging. She wiped her damp hair from her face and her neck, where it stuck to her glistening skin. He looked away, and swallowed.

"What do you like?" she asked breathlessly. "What is it? Tits? Ass?"

He sighed, staring out at the ocean. His hands fell away from her hips, away from her lovely painted skin and the strange chill of her. He'd been defeated and thoroughly humiliated by his body that morning, and Claire Redfield had been an intimate witness to it all. And now… _now_ she straddled him like he was a lame horse that wouldn't get up, whipping him with her taunts and mockery like she was wielding a crop.

For a moment - the briefest instant - his thoughts seemed to turn red at the edges, and he felt a shadow of the murderous rage that had fed him so many months ago. _Dead girls couldn't tell anyone what had...or had not...transpired, could they?_

 _Think rationally_ , he corrected himself. _There will be others, and not one second of this incident would matter in the grand scheme of things. Compatibility be damned, he would try another of those idiots and see if he couldn't_ -

From the corner of his eye, he saw the quick, furious movements of her fingers near her chest. His face settled into its natural scowl.

But the glower dropped when he saw her undoing the tiny eyehooks on the front of her sports bra.

Three of them. Small bits of metal clinging to one another, holding her flesh firmly in place, so far out of sight…

The first hook popped loose.

"Stop." The order was a hiss through his teeth.

She didn't answer, letting out an aggravated huff of air as she worked the second eyelet loose.

Though her skin was no more exposed than it had been a few moments ago, he suddenly felt as if the room was spinning. He tried to glare again. He tried to roll his eyes up towards the canopy, or back towards the sea, but they stayed wide, locked on her fingers - unearthly pale against the dark fabric - as they fussed with the final hook, slipping and catching. A nervous kind of clumsiness.

"Don't play the harlot, Claire," he said, struggling to sound _disdainful_ when he was actually _desperate._ The two of them must have made a pitiful sight. His prone body, his soft cock, the sweat dripping down her back, her thighs shuddering as she held herself above him, fumbling with her bra.

"Just do your fucking job," she muttered, wiggling the final clasp free.

He held his breath, still transfixed by the valley of her sternum. The spandex bra quivered with her heartbeat, barely covering her breasts.

His cock twitched, waking inside of her.

She must have felt it as well. Her eyes, cold with a steely kind of determination, focused on his.

Slowly, she eased the wide strap over one shoulder, and then the other. The bra slipped off her arm, onto the floor with her shorts. She looked down at him, her expression solemn in the suffocating silence of the villa. Her breasts were larger than he'd imagined...and how he _hated_ himself for having ever imagined them in the first place. But even _he_ had to admit that she was beautifully shaped - heavy and full and buoyant. The expanse of her naked skin, from her throat to her nipples, was calicoed with tawny freckles, exactly as he'd thought; the lovely round undersides of her breasts were unmarked alabaster. Her areolae were pale pink, barely pink at all, and puffy with what he could only assume was the same reluctant arousal he felt in his loins. Her nipples were small, nearly inverted.

His first thought nauseated him: _would those nipples harden with suckling?_

His cock throbbed, roaring back to life. He was a helpless teenage boy beneath her.

Beneath Claire Redfield.

And he _despised_ her passionately.

He despised the power she suddenly held over his weak, human body. He'd spent the better part of a decade immunizing himself against such witchcraft, setting himself _above_ it all...and now that wild animal instinct rushed back, overtaking him with a force that seemed to knock the air from his lungs.

It felt new.

It felt familiar.

It felt wrong and right, vivid and surreal, so many things in between...

She rolled her hips, her eyes open and wide in all their blinding blueness. He saw a flash of concern on her face as she rose up, letting him slip nearly all the way out of the secret place between her legs…and then he was plunged into her cool-warmth again.

They both gasped, mirroring the other's look of shamed astonishment.

He was inside. All of him…every millimeter…was deep _inside_ of her.

She arched her back and rocked down onto him again, slower this time, testing the depth of his cock. Testing how it stretched her walls. All the while, they looked at each other - shocked, and sickened, and something else.

 _Something else._

As she rode him, he swore he felt her getting… _wetter_. Growing slicker all around him. The friction seemed to lessen with each successive thrust, until there was no resistance between them at all. He felt himself bump up against her cervix, and she unmistakably ground down on him so that he circled and massaged the deepest part of her. She carried on that way for a maddeningly long time, fucking his cock as far into herself as she could. It was almost… _greedy._ If he hadn't known much, much better, he might have thought...

Her head fell back, the messy waterfall of her copper hair tumbling over her shoulder, tangling about her neck, slick and shining with her sweat in early morning sunlight. He stared at her, unabashed. He stared at her vulnerable milky throat, exposed to him in her lapse of restraint. At her stomach trembling with every labored breath. At her mottled shoulders, tensing with every movement.

"You can touch me," she whispered in the still air. "If it helps."

He looked up at her face again, his mouth slack. She was glowing, the rising sun a halo behind her.

Still rocking them both, back and forth, back and forth, like the rolling, endless sea, she picked up his hands in her own.

"Touch me," she said softly. "Don't hurt me…don't hurt me…"

 _Never again_ , he wanted more than anything to say. _Never again._ But he could only lay beneath her, mute and gluttonous for whatever pleasure she gave him.

She brought his hands to her breasts, laying his palms over their fullness, holding them there and molding his fingers with her own. She shivered, her eyes fluttering closed.

"God, you're so warm." Her voice was a husky whisper, a breath caught in her chest…a secret prayer.

He nearly moaned at the feel of her flesh. He squeezed gently, marveling at the swollen heaviness of her breasts, at the silkiness of her skin. She let out another shaking breath as he touched her, and the edge of one white tooth caught the swell of her bottom lip. She pressed his hands tighter against her.

He _did_ moan then - a sorry, guttural sound that seemed to force its way out of him, breaking past any sense of shame he felt - as she ground herself on him, against him. As he held her breasts, and her little nipples pebbled in the center of his palms. She let go of his hands and steadied herself on his tense thighs, rolling her hips at a delirious, steady pace.

The meeting of their bodies, wet and soft and measured, reverberated around the quiet villa. Amber sunlight fell across the bed, over her chest and her ribs and her belly; she was painted with the palest gold of the morning. His fingertips trailed over her tight little nipples, drawn out by his accidental touch; he saw her flinch under the feather-light caress, her stomach clenching and her breasts quivering. She arched up towards his hands then, gasping quietly: an _invitation_. He obliged, teasing the turgid pink tips of her breasts between the pads of his forefinger and thumb. He was slow and gentle, the wicked part of him thinking so many steps ahead, relishing in all the ways he might use her pleasure against her, against her dull brother even… while another part of him… the new and unnervingly human part, wanted to see her writhe in pleasure without any ulterior motive. She moved in time to the circles he tickled around her nipples. Her eyes still squeezed shut, she sighed and trembled as if… as if they were old lovers, falling back into bed after years apart.

He realized then that the act had, somewhere along the line, become consensual.

Claire Redfield - one of his most formidable enemies, one of the _deepest_ thorns in his side - was impaled on his cock, of her own accord… her fierce features contorted in what could only be ecstasy.

He grunted through his tightly clenched teeth. His stomach seized and felt the tingling of an orgasm building just beneath his testicles.

"You're close," she breathed, and leaned over him.

He was mesmerized - he couldn't help himself - his gaze following her breasts, swaying so near his face. He panted, trying to hold on, to hold out, but his body was wracked with each labored breath. He gently pulled on her nipples, wanting desperately to feel them in his mouth. He didn't dare, though…he _couldn't_. His eyelids fluttered shut and his brow furrowed in pleasure, or pain, or disbelief.

 _How had he ended up here? How?_

She grabbed the edge of the headboard and rode him hard. Every thrust of her hips thumped the bed frame against the wall. "Oh god…come," she growled. "Come inside me." The mattress shifted under them, sliding on the box springs, the bed squeaking in protest.

His cock throbbed. The exhausted muscles in his lower belly trembled with exertion. His toes curled under the blanket.

"I want you to come," she commanded again.

He jerked inside of her. _So close. So close now._ He took a deep, gasping breath and held it, the cords of muscle and latticework of veins straining in his neck. He tossed his head back and forth on the pillow, damp with his own sweat, and he fought, roaring in his helplessness. The sound of his agony echoed in the villa.

"Don't fight it…don't fight me," she begged, still thrusting. "Please come…please."

And then…he felt her cool fingers, her palm, soft and tender against the side of his reddened face.

He whimpered - a pitiful noise in the back of his throat, one he couldn't contain - and came in five nearly-painful streams against her cervix.

* * *

 _ **March 20, 2009**_

She woke up disoriented. Her head pounded. The sheets were damp, twisted around her legs. It was still late, and dim yellow light from the streetlamp filtered through the bedroom blinds.

"Neil?" she croaked into the dark. Her voice was thin and reedy. Her mouth was dry, and her tongue felt like cotton.

She reached over, patting the sheets beside her. The bed was empty. Muffled noise filtered down the hallway. The refrigerator door opening and closing. The sound of water rushing from the kitchen faucet. Footsteps on squeaking floorboards. Muffled conversation from the television.

She ran a palm across her face, kicking her legs free from the sheets. She sat up, and the room swam around her, tilting to an odd angle. Her temples throbbed.

She didn't think she'd had that much to drink. She'd wanted to. She'd wanted to tip the whole goddamn bottle back - single malt scotch, some fancy shit from when she'd gotten her promotion. She'd been saving it for something special.

There wasn't a whole lot of _special_ to look forward to now.

There'd been broadcasts from Turkey that morning, frantically detailing the first signs of an outbreak in Ankara. There were rumors of cases erupting in Pakistan, India, China. Efforts to contain the virus doubled as it spread.

And spread.

And spread.

 _C-virus._ They called it the C-virus and some crazy, crooked part of her wanted to laugh at that. It felt like they'd made it just for her. Half Birkin, half Alexia. Half Raccoon, half Rockfort. Half crawling through sewers with blood on her face, half Steve dying with her name on his lips...

She'd pulled out her phone last night, wriggling free from the dead weight of Neil's arm, and she'd sent a bleary-eyed text before she'd passed out. One word to Leon.

 _News?_

She fumbled with the phone now, squinting down at his response.

 _I'll call._

That was it.

It meant no good news. It meant he was in over his head. It meant she'd hear from him in a week, if she was lucky.

She pushed herself out of the bed, letting the sheet fall to the floor, and she padded out towards the living room. Neil sat on the couch - shirtless, unshowered - hunched forward with his eyes locked on the television. He held a cigarette in his left hand.

"I told you not to do that shit in here," she muttered, crossing over to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator herself, frowning at the choices. Some withered produce. Some strawberry yogurt. A takeout box of old orange chicken.

She grabbed one of the cartons of yogurt, twisting it around, searching for an expiration date.

"I think your landlord's got bigger stuff to worry about," Neil said, leaning back. He flipped from one channel to the next - reporters in Athens, correspondents in Kiev, experts from the CDC sharing tips to avoid contamination.

 _"Stay indoors unless absolutely necessary. Familiarize yourself with your local community's preparedness plan. Report any abnormalities to-"_

The yogurt expired two days ago. She peeled the foil lid back, sniffing delicately, and shrugged to herself. She fished through the drawer for a spoon. "Anything on the BSSA?" she asked, trying to keep her voice even. She bumped the drawer closed with her hip.

"Not the part you wanna know about." He muted the television, and tilted his head back against the couch, taking a long drag of the cigarette. A coil of smoke slipped from between his lips, curling into the air.

She nodded to herself, dipping the spoon into the yogurt. "I was thinking it might not be the worst idea to run by HQ in the morning." She popped the spoonful into her mouth, mumbling around it. "There might be something in that last report from Kijuju-"

"There's not," he muttered.

"Yeah, but the mortality count didn't include-"

"It covered everything."

"They might not have known whether-"

"Stop it." His voice was weary, drained. He sat the remote down gently, lining it up with the arm of the couch. He raised the cigarette to his lips again. "Stop doing this shit to yourself. We've talked about this."

Instead of answering, she stabbed a gelatinous strawberry with the end of the spoon, severing it in half.

She heard him sigh. The leather couch squeaked as he pushed himself up, crossing the room towards her. He stopped before her, looking at her face. Looking down at the yogurt carton. Looking away towards the sink, and tossing the butt of his cigarette into it. Stretching for time. Stretching for words.

Always fucking stretching.

"I can't imagine what you're going through," he finally said. The same canned, empty thing he'd said a thousand times. "This is stressful enough for the rest of the world, but Chris was right in the middle…"

"He's alive." Her voice cut over his. She scooped up half of the skewered strawberry, glaring down at it. "I know he is. And there's a fucking trail somewhere. There's...there's some kind of last correspondence, something." She shifted her glare up to him, tightening her grip. The plastic crinkled beneath her fingers.

He sighed again - _always fucking sighing -_ reaching up to run a hand through his hair. "Claire, you've got access to everything I've got access to. And I swear, if there's anything you need to know, I'll tell you the second-"

"Don't feed me that bullshit!" She slammed the carton down behind her. Yogurt splattered across the counter. "I've been working with you for five goddamn years. You think I'm not smart enough to know when something's going on? When shit's bigger than you're letting on? What about that stuff from the UN? You've had those reports on your desk for two fucking _weeks,_ and you haven't even looked at them."

"Hey. Hey now," he started, in his gentle voice. His careful voice. His kid-glove, defusing-a-bomb voice. "We shouldn't...let's not get into this right now, okay?"

"Yeah, I'm sorry. It's a _bad fucking time_ for you right now, isn't it?" She moved to shoulder past him, but he stepped to the side, blocking her. She exhaled heavily, bristling, and tilted her chin up towards him. When she spoke, her words wavered, pressed through tightly-clenched teeth. "Something...isn't right, Neil. Something isn't fucking _right._ He's out there. He knows something. He knows why this is happening."

"Sure. I know." He reached out, pulling her into his arms. She stiffened against his torso. He smelled like cigarette ash. "I'm sorry. I know. I'll go check the reports tomorrow, okay? Maybe there's...some kind of answer. I don't know." He tripped over the words. He ran his fingers through the tangled ends of her hair. He sounded desperate, fumbling through another attempt to comfort her. "I'll look in the morning. Let's just...go back to bed, okay? Let's just do that."

 _Let's just do that_ while the world unraveled around them. Thread after thread snapping. It wouldn't hold.

They wouldn't hold. The two of them. Him and her.

Him and her.

Her stomach lurched over the words. The way they didn't fit. The way his skin stuck to her skin, and left her feeling like she needed a shower.

But she nodded against his chest. She let him lead her back to the bed, and she crawled in beside him, and she kissed him until the burnt ash taste left his mouth, and she arched beneath him like she could feel his cock in her when he thrust between her thighs.

He came.

She didn't.

He slept.

She didn't.

He woke up in the morning. Splashed some water on his face. Grabbed a wrinkled button-down shirt off the floor. Barely looked at her as she clutched the sheets to her bare chest, lying in bed, watching him dress. Told her not to worry as he rushed out the door. Said he'd look over the UN reports. Said he'd come back in two hours, maybe less.

He didn't.

* * *

 _ **July 3, 2009**_

Claire sat back on her heels; Wesker had _finally_ gone over the edge, still buried deep inside her. She stared up at the canopy and counted each throb of his cock.

 _One. Two._

 _Three._

 _Four._

A pause, but his body was still drawn as tight as a bow, unfinished.

 _Come on._

 _Comeoncomeoncomeon._

She exhaled through her nose, her lips pursing.

 _Five._ A final jet of come, not as strong as the rest. He sighed, shaking beneath her in his release.

It was different, somehow, than it was with other men. She could... _feel_ his semen more than she remembered with others. His was warmer, like the rest of him. She felt it spreading around his length inside of her.

It was almost pleasant.

It was a terrible thought.

And she _hated_ it.

Sex with him hadn't been what she'd expected. Not at all. No choking, or pain, or spitting or debasement or humiliation. No control. He wasn't even rough. Had it been anyone else…had it been Leon, even Neil...she might have let herself enjoy it.

She watched a bead of sweat catch the morning sun and trickle down his collarbone, through thick blond curls at the base of his throat, peeking out from his t-shirt.

 _She hadn't expected him to have body hair,_ she thought, almost idly.

She shook her head, clearing it. Why had she expected anything? What did she care if he shaved or waxed or…whatever he did?

She didn't.

She _didn't._

"Hey," she said firmly, trying to sound more like herself.

His eyes, once so bright and cruel and observant, cracked open lazily. His gaze was strangely hazy and unfocused; his pupils contracted to thin slits in the morning light. From under his thick eyelashes, he looked at her - _all_ of her.

She licked her lips and yanked the sheets up around herself. He watched, his expression detached and dreamy; it was doubtful that anything was registering in his post-coital mind at all. She hated that look. She hated him. She hated _this_. The way the moment lingered, hanging in the air between them. "What do I…should I lay on my back now, or what? Before this shit all drips out of me?" Her words were a sharp bark, chasing the gauzy softness away.

He blinked quickly, shaken by her voice. He cleared his throat. "Yes. On your back, your pelvis tilted up."

She pushed herself off of him. His softening cock slipped from her, leaving her thighs wet with his come, and to her dismay, her own arousal. She grimaced, letting out a disgusted noise. He glanced at her as he sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. His back to her, he rubbed his face. She laid down and arranged the sheet over herself, covering every inch of skin she could.

Without looking, he handed one of his dozen pillows to her. She glared at his hunched shoulders and shoved the pillow under her hips.

"Are you…" His hand moved in circles as he seemed to search his orgasm-addled vocabulary for a word. "Decent?" he asked finally.

She folded her arm over the sheet across her chest. "Yeah," she replied, clipped.

He turned to her then, looking down.

"What?" she snapped.

"Did you…" She heard the reluctance in voice. She had never heard him hesitate before. Not that they had any measurable amount of non-violent communication over the years, but he didn't seem like the kind to search for words.

"Did I _what_?"

He kept his eyes lowered. "Did you achieve-"

"Are you fucking serious?" She glared at him, drawing back as far as she could. "You wanna know if I came? With _you?"_

He stared at her for a moment, holding her gaze, before realization sunk in. His eyes narrowed into that familiar red-gold scowl.

"Of course. My deepest apologies, Ms. Redfield," he snarled. "Your theatrics were so very convincing." He tugged roughly at the zipper of his shorts. "I suppose you willed your nipples to hardness, hmm? And your cyprine emissions - that too was faked, correct?" He buttoned his fly, his every movement sharp, furious.

"My _what?"_ She held the sheet tighter to her chest, feeling her heart pound, her body tremble in building rage.

"Let me rephrase that so you can keep up," he drawled. His voice was darker, his words more pointed. "I forget that below-average intelligence tends to be a familial trait." He knelt by the side of the bed until he was eye-level with her. "You were _wet._ Dripping. Drenched. Sloppy, even."

She felt her upper lip curl. Her tongue touched the back of her teeth.

Before she could think of a retort, he stood, slipping on one tennis shoe, and then the other. "No amount of acting, Ms. Redfield, could produce that."

He turned to leave.

"You're right," she said.

The sound of her voice stopped him. He waited.

"I was _dripping,_ yeah. Thinking about Leon." She was silent for a beat, imagining Wesker absorbing the idea. Turning it over and over. Examining it for credibility _._ Thoughtful, she ran her fingers over a complex stitch in the beautiful bed linens. She should have left it there - the comment was cutting enough on its own. But he'd called her out, _he'd_ started it, and she had never been the type to choke down last words. "He's bigger."

Wesker's shoulders twitched, tensing and relaxing. He turned to face her. "You're a poor liar, Claire. Truly."

They stared at each other down across the room.

He clasped his hands behind his back. "While in cryostasis, I witnessed Agent Kennedy in all his various states of arousal, and I have to say…I was quite underwhelmed."

Her fingers curled in the sheet. Her jaw clenched.

He took a deep breath and regarded her impassively.

"I imagine that neither of us wishes to repeat this... _experience._ So just lie still for twenty minutes. And then kindly get the fuck out of my bed," he said, smiling.

* * *

The door closed behind him.

Softly.

Gently.

She wished he had slammed it.

She wished the wood had splintered, and the glass had shattered, and the noise had echoed all around the island. She wished that he had left her with something to cling to - some mark of rage, of violation. Some reason for taste of bile on the back of her tongue.

Instead, quiet waves lapped at the pilings beneath the villa.

She turned her head and looked out at the water. It shimmered and glittered invitingly, cerulean and still. It stretched on forever around the coast of their island, and then off to the edge of the horizon. It stretched as far as the eye could see.

She laid her hands on her belly.

 _Please take, whatever you are._

 _Please don't._

 _Please._

She could still feel _herself_ on him. The unnatural warmth of his skin.

He had waited to put his hands on her. He had waited until she had picked up his hands in her own, until she murmured _touch me_ in a voice she hardly recognized. And when he did touch her, it was carefully, cautiously, as if she was made of glass.

 _No one…no one had ever..._

She sobbed, the sound startling her, strangling her. Her hand flew to her mouth, covering it tightly, trying to stifle the weakness in her, to keep it down - but the pain seeped through her fingers. It leaked from her eyes, and slipped down her cheeks. She wiped furiously at her face.

 _Stop._

 _Don't._

"Stop!" she cried aloud, and her voice echoed around the empty villa.

For a moment...for one disgusting second...she wished he had beaten her. Raped her. Left her lying in a puddle of come and blood. That... _that_ would be familiar. Agonizing, unbearable, but familiar. A world she could make sense of, where Albert Wesker took what he wanted, leaving a trail of ruin behind him.

But he hadn't beaten her. He hadn't raped her.

She wasn't sure he had _taken_ anything at all.

She bit down on her fist, closing her eyes as tightly as she could. She swallowed the noises that clawed at her throat.

Nothing was familiar now. A month ago, Claire Redfield had woken up in a world she didn't - _couldn't_ \- recognize.


	3. Don't Look

**Chapter Three: Don't Look**

 _"The path to paradise begins in Hell."_

 _-Dante Alighieri_

 _ **Twenty Minutes After the Incident**_

7:58.

7:59.

8:00.

8:01.

The evidence of her weakness had dried on her face some time ago. She had learned to give in to it from her mother, when she was young.

 _Get it out and then leave it all behind, Claire. That's the only way_ , she'd said.

So she did. She'd let herself cry when she broke her arm. When her dog ran away. When Chris left for the Air Force Academy. She'd let herself cry fiercely - alone - when her parents had died.

She let herself cry while she lay in an enormous, beautiful bed, with the sparkling Pacific Ocean outside the window, and a plush pillow beneath her hips, and Albert Wesker's come between her legs because she was afraid that if she got up to go to the bathroom, their plot would fail.

And she would have to do whatever _that_ was again. And again.

There would be many more tears if she didn't succeed on this first try.

She wiped away her blurry vision and turned her head to the alarm clock on his side table.

8:04.

Twenty minutes had come and gone in the stifling heat of his villa.

She pushed herself to sitting. She didn't feel anything sliding out of her, puddling on the bed. She glanced back to where she had lain on the pillow. No milky spots, no blood. Nothing.

All of _him_ must have stayed inside of her. It surprised her, for a moment, that he hadn't produced more semen than a normal man. That he'd reacted like normal man. He'd felt like a normal man. If she was honest with herself, the entire... _act_...had surprised her.

Slowly, she reached down, picked up her discarded shorts, her underwear crumpled a foot away. She stood and her legs didn't buckle - she felt steady and relieved; she'd half-expected to melt into the floor, to stumble and fall, to vomit, to break down… but she didn't. She planted her bare feet solidly on the gleaming hardwood… and she stood up from his bed.

 _One at a time._

She stepped into the shorts, the panties bunched up in her fist. Right leg. Left leg. The denim slid up over her sticky thighs, up over her hip bones. With shaking fingers, she threaded the button and zipped the fly. She ran her hands over the fabric, smoothing it, feeling the pockets that hung out from the frayed hems. She jammed her underwear into one of them.

She swallowed, light-headed.

 _What's next, little girl? Think hard,_ her mother's voice echoed in her head.

Bra. Tank top.

The bed was a mess. She dug haphazardly through the sheets, foggy-headed, barely focused, forgetting what she was looking for. Her mind moved at a molasses pace. She felt a tingling in her nose, behind her eyes. She fought the sensation.

 _Don't cry anymore. It won't do any good._

She found the sports bra first. She clipped the front together before pulling it over her head and yanking it beneath her breasts. The middle of her cleavage felt cool, a _v_ of perspiration darkening the spandex. She stopped, wavering where she stood.

 _It's done, Claire. You're strong. You'll forget this ever happened._

The tank top was next. She grabbed it off the arm of the couch, tugged it on, felt the stiff wrinkles from dried sweat the night before.

 _Strip the bed, babydoll. You've still got your manners, and it's what you would want._

Lethargic, Claire popped open the press-buttons at the bottom of Wesker's duvet. She pulled the comforter out and folded it over the back of a chair in the corner of his bedroom. She worked on the mountain of pillows then, and finally on the sheets, gathering up the dirty linens so that they were piled neatly in the middle of his bed.

She looked around the room one last time. Anything she left behind would be gone forever. She wouldn't be coming back for it. No matter what.

The sound of Shadow meowing startled her. She whipped around to face her _former_ pet. He kneaded the couch cushion and rolled onto his back, his body arching and writhing at strange angles, begging to be scratched. Expecting affection. Demanding attention.

She leaned over him and looked him directly in his self-satisfied green-gold eyes.

"Burn in Hell, you fucking traitor," she whispered coldly.

He purred louder.

She shook her head in disgust and left.

* * *

After a quick and scalding shower in her villa, Claire headed down to the site the group was clearing that day.

She jogged down the path they all took, through a thicket of vines and strange tropical trees she didn't recognize. It was cooler and darker there, beneath the foliage canopy. The air was humid in the forest. She could feel droplets forming on her skin.

It was nothing like Washington D.C. here. It was nothing like any place she had visited. Even her memories of the time she'd spent in swampy, muggy Florida, staying at her aunt's house after her parents died, fell short. Everything was so _foreign_ that her head ached with it - the cloying and honeyed scent of foreign flowers, the saccharine and savory taste of foreign fruits, the rhythms and cycles of a foreign landscape.

She slowed her pace when she approached the clearing. The sky opened up above her, the trees parting enough that yellow sunlight streamed down and cast gold over the group's work. Everyone was already busy, bent double in the tall grass, tossing branches and palm fronds and stones into a pile near the edge of the treeline. Rebecca was the first to look up and acknowledge her.

"Hey," she said, a little breathless, pushing her mousy-brown bangs out of her eyes.

Claire nodded in greeting, bending over beside her. "What are we doing?"

"Moving all this stuff out of the way. He thinks this'll be a decent place for growing in the fall." Rebecca wiped her face with the back of her gloved hand. A smear of dirt streaked across her forehead.

"Miss _Redfield_."

Claire cringed. His baritone voice called to her from across the clearing. Rebecca's entire body went rigid and she looked at Claire like a deer in blinding headlights - with a mix of pity and terror.

For a moment, Claire held her breath…and then she stood and turned to him.

Wesker, shirtless and glistening in the sun, threw down a bushel of great browned leaves and branches. He stared at her. She could see his vicious red eyes, flashing with rage, glowing like flames beneath his dark sunglasses.

Only an hour before…he had gazed at her with those same eyes, dazed and contented and… _gentle._ She had forgotten, somehow, what he truly was: something inhuman, something man-made. The most dangerous B.O.W. ever created had been inside of her, that very morning, taking its pleasure from her…imagining she took pleasure from _it_. Her blood froze in her veins.

"I wasn't aware this was a voluntary endeavor," he shouted across the grass. His voice boomed, echoing in the trees. He glanced around at her friends, her family. "Everyone but you seems to understand the gravity of this situation, don't they?"

"I wasn't _feeling well_ ," she shot back, her teeth ground so tightly together they hurt.

Wesker glowered. "None of us are feeling well, Miss Redfield."

She looked at him, incredulous. This had been _his_ plan, _his_ idea. It was _his_ fault she was late to begin with.

"Just do your goddamn job," he finally sneered, mirroring what she'd said to him in his bed.

Her jaw tightened, but she put on the gloves Rebecca handed her, and began picking up debris like everyone else. And as sweat dripped down her nose and burned her eyes, she promised herself she would never be tricked by clever monsters again.

* * *

 _ **March 28, 2009**_

The streets were eerily silent.

She walked. Her footsteps echoed on the pavement. Storefront lights flickered on and off, buzzing and crackling as the last of the generators failed. In the distance, the smell of smoke rose on the wind.

Smoke and ash and burning. The scent of melted rubber and scorched wood.

She hadn't felt this way in years. The sharp needling of adrenaline in her veins. Tensing, trembling muscles. Ears and eyes straining for any sign of movement in the empty world, in the hollowed-out shells of buildings that lined the street.

She hadn't been _this girl_ in years. High ponytail. Gun at her hip, knife in her boot. Turning tight corners and casting quick glances over her shoulder as she walked. But it all came rushing back, as easily as breathing. As walking. One foot before the other, trying not to jump at wavering shadows and creaking hinges.

She clutched the strap of her backpack, darting across the abandoned road. Dead traffic lights swung overhead.

Nothing moved.

When the virus struck - a military-grade missile, source unknown - it took less than a week to travel up the coast of Central America, carving a path through the Southwest, out towards the Pacific, out towards the Eastern Seaboard. Less than a week to reach D.C.

Neil had left - _disappeared,_ she corrected herself, _disappeared_ \- and she had been alone for days, watching the destruction play out from her apartment.

It wasn't the destruction she'd expected.

In his final transmission, Chris had talked about what he was up against in Kijuju. A virus he called Uroboros. A mass of writhing tentacles, black and slick, that seemingly devoured everything it touched.

This...this was something else entirely. Insect parts. A virus with a chrysalis nothing could crack. People changing, mutating, new eyes and legs and wings and shells. New minds. _Minds_ that could think, react, respond. Quick and sharp. Aware.

 _C-virus. C-virus. From T to G to C. The same thing again, again, again, again, worse each time, something new, but the same toxic, twisted, gnarled roots, spreading and spreading..._

She mentally shook herself, quickening her pace, and let the thoughts blur behind her. She could see the gas station now. She squinted towards the building. The door looked intact. The windows looked unbroken. The street looked empty.

 _Good._

She repeated the plan to herself. She'd been silently reciting it over and over as she walked, words looping in time with her footfalls. _Get in. Quick check around the perimeter. Staples - first aid, water, dried fruit, jerky - whatever she could fit in her backpack. Check behind the counter for ammo. Five minutes tops. Then back out, grab the cat, head north towards 495, get past it before the sun-_

Something shattered in the dark, and echoed all around her.

A gunshot.

It came from behind her. The blast sounded heavy as a shotgun, and she froze immediately, every muscle in her body seizing tight.

The blast was followed by a shout. The words were garbled and unintelligible, but it was no piercing, fearful scream. And it was distinctly human.

She quickened her pace towards the building. She'd have to be quick. She'd have to be fucking _fast._ If there were others out scavenging, prowling one of the last intact blocks of the city...she didn't want to be caught in the middle of it.

The main door would be sealed tight. Chained up, or barricaded from the inside. The front windows were reinforced with iron bars. The bathrooms, though...she'd been in there a few times. Narrow windows with plain fogged glass.

She wasn't nearly as limber now, compared to when she was nineteen, but she could try to wrench one open and wriggle her way through. Or she could shatter the glass, and hope whoever she met inside was feeling a little generous.

And more than a little uninfected.

She rounded the corner of the building, and was met with another empty stretch of road. The moon glinted off street signs, green and silver-white. The shouting in the distance had fallen silent.

 _Get in. Get out. Fucking. Fast._

* * *

 _ **Two Weeks From the Incident**_

Days passed. Quick and slow. Stuttering and sluggish.

When she first arrived on the island - when she woke up, and found herself stranded on the bright white sand, and the world around her smelled like salt and heat and sun - she thought time would never feel normal again. She thought the days and nights would carve themselves into her skin, one after the other. Mark after mark. Red sunrises and purple sunsets she could wear like bruises.

 _That's day fifteen,_ she would say, examining them in the mirror. _That's day twenty-two._

But day fifteen didn't feel so different from day twenty-two. And day twenty-two didn't feel so different from day thirty-five. They bled together, tangled up with one another. _Salt and heat and sun._

Two weeks came and went - day now, day something, day clear morning and circling seagulls and breaking surf - and she would hardly have known it.

Until she woke up to find a streak of dark red blood staining the crotch of her panties.

She stared down at them, letting out a deep, trembling breath. She leaned against the back of the toilet, arms wrapped around her midsection.

She felt…relieved.

Not relieved.

Not _not_ relieved.

She felt something. Nothing. A vague, grey space somewhere in the middle.

 _It might have worked. It probably didn't. But it might have. But it definitely didn't._

 _They would have to try again._

The thought didn't make her sick. It made her stomach flip, made her mouth dry, made her breath hitch...but it didn't make her feel like vomiting.

It didn't make her feel like screaming. Not anymore.

Now it was only nerves. Just nerves.

 _Everything was fine._

 _Things weren't so different._

This morning, she ran the same comb through the same locks of copper hair _they'd stuck to her throat and brushed his face and she'd seen him staring_ and she put on the same black tank top and the same pair of jean shorts _after twenty awful minutes she'd crawled from the bed and fumbled with her clothes and didn't realize her top was inside-out until she made it back to her villa_. She walked down the same sun-bleached wooden pier _she'd darted by quiet cabins with drawn curtains and she'd kept her head down and chewed her lip_ and climbed the same stone stairs to the veranda to join the others for breakfast _and if someone had stopped her, if someone had told her she looked pale, sick, shaken, asked what was wrong, she would have cracked into a thousand pieces._

 _Because nothing had been wrong._

She took a seat beside Sherry. She reached for a pitcher of blush-colored juice. Papaya, maybe. Probably.

 _They would have to try again._ The thought grated at her. The memories scratched her. She waited for them to sink in. For the panic to hit, and her throat to close, and her hands to go numb.

The pitcher didn't shake in her hands. The juice didn't slosh over the rim of her glass, spilling to the table.

 _They would have to try again._

"You want some…ham, or something?" Sherry asked, passing her a platter. Claire narrowed her eyes at the plate, more than a little distrustful.

"I was digging around in the meat locker and found it way in the back," Sherry said. "I smelled it, after it was cooked. Rebecca gave her professional medical opinion - she says it's fine." She shrugged.

Conversation drifted down from both ends of the table. The morning breeze rustled the palm fronds and the short, gnarled shrubs of sea grapes. Chris slid into the chair across from her, groaning as he settled back against the wood.

 _They would have to try again._

"You okay?" Sherry asked, passing the plate to him. He frowned and declined the mystery meat, looking down the table at the rest of the spread.

"Yeah. Had to climb around and check a couple of the...cells...whatever you call them…" He pulled a platter of fruit towards him.

"PV cells," Sherry offered, biting into a salad cracker and brushing the crumbs off her lap.

 _She would have him inside her again. She had done it once. She'd spent two weeks trying not to think, two weeks hiding, pushing it to the farthest corners of her mind. And it would happen again._

"Yeah. Those. We thought a couple of the ones on the edge might be cracking." He jerked his head towards a jar of strawberry jam. "Pass me that?"

Sherry leaned across Claire, grabbing the jar. "Are they good?"

 _She'd have to tell him. She didn't know how. They'd been avoiding each other for two weeks now. They'd been traveling in wide orbits, barely exchanging glances, much less words. She'd have to tell him it didn't work._

"Look fine for now." He spooned a sticky glob of bright red jam out, scraping it onto his own cracker. "Hope they stay that way."

 _Hell, maybe it was a sign. Maybe it wouldn't work out. Maybe he was infertile. Maybe he'd read the test wrong, and she was. Maybe they wouldn't have to try again. Maybe she could forget all of this. And he'd move on to someone else._

She stared into the glass, watching the juice ripple as Sherry bumped the table. Something deep in her stomach twisted at the thought.

 _He'd move on to someone else._

"Me too," Sherry answered, nodding emphatically at Chris. "I don't want to be this person, but if we lose electricity, I swear…"

 _He'd move on to someone else…when she'd taken her top off for him. She'd taken her bra off for him. She'd taken it off and he'd seen her body, he'd touched her body, and her body had responded. It had moved for him. It had moved with him. He'd move on to someone else but he'd already felt_ her _muscles tensing and shuddering and she'd felt her nerves shivering and that was normal, she couldn't help it, it was just biology, it was normal, it was-_

"Morning," Chris muttered under his breath. She glanced up to see Wesker brushing behind his chair.

Two weeks had passed, and it felt like half a breath, and it felt like time had frozen all around them.

She'd seen him. Of course she'd seen him. He was everywhere, doing everything. He was clearing brush from the edge of the jungle. He was hauling nets full of fish in from the bay. He was digging trenches for rainwater runoff, and he was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and the muscles in his back rippled with every move…

 _Don't look,_ she'd tell herself, hurrying past. She didn't need to look. She didn't _want_ to look. She'd seen more than enough of him already.

But she always looked.

And he always caught her staring.

It happened that morning. Every morning. Fourteen mornings in a row. He passed behind Chris, heading to the far end of the table, and he was just a flicker of movement and her mind said _don't look_ and her eyes were on him almost instantly, watching as he slipped into his chair, pulling a bowl of sliced melon towards him.

He grabbed a spoon, and he froze - like a thing in the wild, sensing danger - and tilted his head towards her.

His sunglasses hid his gaze, but she knew it was leveled on her. Piercing. Blistering.

Almost indignant.

It hit her all at once, a quick jab to the stomach: _he could smell her._

He could smell her bleeding.

 _Look away,_ she told herself.

But she didn't.

And neither did he.

"...we could bring it up at the meeting today. You guys in?" She heard Chris slurping aggressively on the skin of some fruit she didn't recognize.

"Definitely," Sherry answered. Bright and chirpy. "Claire?"

 _Look. Away._ And she tore her eyes away from him - his stern figure, his disapproving frown, his forearm resting on the table, his thumb tapping against the handle of his spoon as he stared.

Glared. He was glaring at her. Definitely glaring.

 _Jesus Christ. Stop looking at him._

She grabbed the glass of juice, chugging it as quickly as she could.

"Uh...Claire?"

"Mhm," she answered, in what she hoped was a noncommittal way, and her voice echoed in the glass. The juice was sickly sweet. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

Fourteen days ago, he'd fucked her. She'd fucked him. They'd fucked each other. She didn't know. Except she _did_ know, because she'd been on top of him, pressing him down into the mattress, desperate to get it over with. And now she was sitting here, shoving a too-big bite of something, _anything_ , into her face so she didn't have to talk. Because Chris might ask her a question about coconuts, or fence posts, or harvesting oysters, _whatever the fuck_ they talked about now, and all she could think about was the blood between her legs. How Wesker was smelling it, Wesker was smelling _her_ , and thinking about her, and how in two more weeks, they'd be back staring at the bed, and he'd be doing more than thinking...

"Whoa!" A clatter erupted from the far end of the table, followed by Moira's voice. "Dude, what the fu…" She stopped, swallowing the end of her sentence.

Claire turned. The bowl of melon was in pieces on the ground. Fruit spilled across the stones, pale green and bright yellow.

Wesker looked down at it. His lips tightened into a near-frown.

"My apologies," he muttered. And he pushed away from the table. In a few strides he was far from the group, heading around a corner towards the villas.

Josh cleared his throat. Rebecca hopped out of her chair, muttering about cleaning up. Moira flicked a stray melon seed from her shoulder.

Chris raised an eyebrow, turning to watch Wesker leave. He shook his head.

Claire focused on a point just above Chris's shoulder. She curled her fingers around the edge of the table.

 _Don't look,_ she told herself, over and over. _Don't look._

* * *

 _ **March 28, 2009**_

She landed on the bathroom tile, knees buckling from the impact. She spit a piece of hair out of her mouth. She brushed splintered wood from her palms.

The window had been a tight squeeze, but the right choice. The place was silent, and dark, and had a distinctly unpleasant smell - stale water, mildew, cleaning chemicals. The window creaked back into place behind her, shutting out the sparse light from the outside world.

She held her breath as she crossed the room, and placed both palms on the door, straining to hear.

Nothing seemed to be moving on the other side. There was always a chance someone had decided to camp out in here...and anyone who'd made it this long would know to be silent, and on their guard.

But they'd also know to board the windows up. Or barricade the doors. She gave it a slight push, and it opened easily. Clean and quiet.

The inside of the store was awash in moonlight. It slanted across the shelves, illuminating untouched displays - snack cakes and bags of chips, gum and bandages and travel packs of Tylenol. Nothing seemed to be disturbed.

She slung her backpack off one shoulder, opening the main compartment. She'd aim to get enough food to last a week. Water was going to be the biggest issue - bulky, and heavy, but she'd take as much as she could. There would be more abandoned businesses along the way to...wherever.

She started with a shelf to her left. Protein bars. Peanut butter. Oatmeal raisin. Chocolate chip cookie dough - the kind Chris always had on him.

 _Had._

She grabbed a handful, shoving them into the bag. They'd be perfect. Light. Efficient. _He wouldn't ever eat them again._ Not very tasty - they always felt like chalk on her tongue, or coated the roof of her mouth - but they'd keep her going. _He'd take two with him to the gym each morning before work. There was always a box on top of his refrigerator._

She gritted her teeth, moving down the aisle. Granola bars. A shelf full of granola bars. Honey oat. She could grab some of those.

" _You could try eating something real for breakfast," she'd told him, when she was nineteen, home from college, sprawled out on the ratty couch in his apartment. The springs dug into her spine. "People cook stuff sometimes. Eggs. Whatever."_

" _Don't have time," he'd muttered - almost slurring - as he stumbled to the coffee pot. He'd frowned at the leftover liquid in the bottom. Sniffed it. Poured it in the sink, and shoved the pot back on the unit._

She reached out, bracing herself on one of the shelves. The box of granola bars tumbled to the floor. _Not now,_ she told herself, fingers curling around the metal grating. _Not now. You're here. He's not. You keep going. Not now…_

Her thoughts crashed to a halt when she heard something rustle across the store. A switch clicked, and the beam of a flashlight spilled across the tile.

"Who's there?" It was a man's voice, rough and ragged. Weary. The light flickered from the floor to the wall and back again, sweeping the store.

She stayed frozen. Her pulse leapt to her throat.

"Maybe it was something in the trash again," another voice - a woman - whispered from the dark.

"Mom?" A child. Young. Too young for this. The woman shushed them.

 _Shit._

 _Shit, shit, shit._

She carefully eased her backpack strap onto her shoulder, moving a centimeter at a time. She had to get out. She could get supplies somewhere else - bust in the door of a neighboring apartment, someone who'd already fled the city. Scavenge through the dumpsters. She'd find what she needed. She'd needed to-

She took a step back, onto one of the granola bars. It crunched beneath her boot, echoing like a firecracker in the tiny, silent store.

 _Shit._

"Stay here," the man hissed. Nylon fabric rustled. Something rattled in the dark. The beam from the flashlight bobbed up and down, then steadied, resuming its sweep from corner to corner of the gas station.

"Whoever's in here, we're armed!" He was trying to keep his voice even. She could hear the edge of panic in it.

She could step out...hands up, no weapons...but he'd be ready to shoot at the first sign of movement. She could try to run, skidding across the tile, scrambling back out the bathroom window. It would be noisy. Messy. Leave her too open.

She could call out to him - full name, age, job, brother, cat, anything that made her human. Tell him exactly where she was. Exactly why she was there.

It was the only option. That, or risk getting her head blown off in a moment of panic. She took a deep breath, turning towards the aisle the man hand wandered down. He had a family. She wasn't a threat to them. He'd understand. He'd-

Her thoughts were cut short by an eruption of noise from the front of the gas station. Glass shattered, cascading to the floor in a waterfall of sparkling silver-white. The child shrieked, and there was a clamor of noise from the corner as they scrambled away from the danger.

Claire saw the man run from the aisle out of the corner of her eye - a black silhouette racing towards the front of the store. She crouched behind the shelf, down on her hands and knees, hidden out of sight from the windows.

"We got people in here!" someone outside shouted. She heard his boots crunch on the glass as he stepped through the shattered door.

There was a heavy pause. Too heavy. Too long.

Something was wrong.

And then:

"We're just...we're just camped out here." The man's voice wavered as he spoke. There was a desperate, spiking edge to his words. She heard a metallic _clank_ as he dropped his weapon to the ground. The beam from the flashlight bounced as it hit the floor. "Just staying somewhere safe overnight. You can take whatever you-"

A single gunshot echoed all around the store.

Something heavy hit the floor with a dull, sickening _thud._

She inhaled sharply, eyes widening. She heard a muffled cry from the corner - the woman had covered the child's mouth. More footsteps. She scrambled towards the middle of the aisle. Her palms were sweaty, sliding against the linoleum as she crawled.

"Grab those two," someone said. Gruff. Abrupt. "Check around for anyone else. Start bagging this shit up."

She clambered away into the next aisle - a corner with scratch-off tickets and a display full of melted ice cream - and fumbled for her gun, leaning back against the shelves.

They'd killed him.

They'd killed him - an unarmed man, while his wife and child watched.

He'd dropped his gun. He'd told them to take whatever they wanted, and they'd shot him without hesitating.

And they were _humans._

She closed her eyes, listening carefully, trying to track the footsteps. Two men winding their way around the far wall, near the cash register. At least one by the door. One...no, two heading towards the woman, who yelled _stay back_ into the dark, her words cracking with tears.

Five men. Maybe more. One with a handgun - and there was no way that's all they'd brought.

Her own gun trembled in her hand. She'd faced worse odds before. She'd run through the halls of an Umbrella lab, a hail of bullets behind her. She'd fought through hordes of the infected. She'd stared down William Birkin, Albert Wesker, Alfred and Alexia Ashford...

She'd killed monsters.

 _Monsters._ Creatures with dripping fangs and sharpened claws and rotting flesh, who fought ferociously, who fought mindlessly. Who tore through humans like they were nothing but meat.

Those were easy. Those were twisted, terrible things. Everything inside them was distorted. Unrecognizable.

These were people.

People, thinking and talking and killing other people. While the world disintegrated around them. While they all desperately clung to anything that looked stable.

She didn't kill people.

 _She didn't kill people._

The woman screamed. Scuffled. Begged incoherently, words tangled in her weeping. _No_ and _please_ and _don't,_ over and over. The child cried for their mother.

 _She had to help. She had to help. She couldn't hurt anyone. They were people. She could talk to them. They would listen. She couldn't hurt them. She had to -_

Another gunshot. The screaming stopped. The crying rose, high and piercing.

"See what's in their bags," a man said. "And shut the kid up."

Five men, six men, seven men, she didn't know how many men. A gas station at the end of the world. Blood on the floor. A child...a child, struggling, shouting, and no monsters in sight, no monsters tearing down the door, no putrid flesh or lolling tongues or yellowed bones showing through gaping wounds. Nothing but men and a child and two dead bodies and her. Her saying _move move move,_ and her body staying frozen, because they were people, they were all _people,_ she didn't kill people, she didn't, she couldn't-

A final shot.

It was somehow quieter than the last two. No mad scramble. No agonizing scream.

Just another lifeless body hitting the floor, and men who went on about their business, unzipping bags, rifling through shelves.

Men.

People.

Her throat burned, a wave of bile rising in her stomach.

 _Go. Don't stop. Don't look._ She bit down on her tongue. She tasted blood, sharp and metallic. _Just run. Don't look. Don't look. Don't look._

She pushed away from the shelf, stumbling towards the bathroom. She heard a shout behind her as she burst through the door.

Outside, she would vomit. She would cry. She would scream and bite her knuckles until the skin bled.

But not yet.

 _Don't look. Just run._

* * *

The apartment door slammed shut behind her. She locked the deadbolt. The chain. Pushed dresser back in front of it, boots squeaking and slipping on the floor, vision blurring with tears.

Her hands wouldn't stop shaking.

They wouldn't stop. They wouldn't stop, and she couldn't breathe.

She ran her fingers through her hair - greasy, matted with sweat and dirt - and yanked her ponytail loose.

Her backpack fell to the floor - _too loud, keep quiet, there might be something listening_ \- and she followed it, sliding down the living room wall.

They'd died. Three people. Two parents and a child. They'd died one after another, while she'd stayed silent, while she'd crouched behind a shelf and listened to them screaming.

Monsters hadn't torn them limb from limb.

A person had shot them. Point-blank. Ruthless. A person had watched them die.

Claire Redfield knew how to kill a monster. She knew how pump them full of metal. Drive her knife into their vulnerable places. Stomp through crumbling bones and sagging tissue, all without flinching.

She didn't know how to kill a person.

And she realized...as she choked down sob after terrible sob, digging her nails into the flesh of her palms, telling herself she was weak weak _weak..._ she wasn't sure she could live in a world where she had to learn.

It struck like an electrical current, sparking through her veins. A sudden, shocking finality.

 _She couldn't._

She was a survivor. She was wired to fight. She was all grit, all guts. She had clawed her way through hell once. Twice. Three times.

But hell was everywhere now. And there was nothing...no one...waiting on the other side.

The sobs stopped as abruptly as they'd begun. Tears clung to her eyelashes as she looked around the apartment. A place full of shadows. She felt like she was looking at it through a series of pictures, flipping through a photo album. Somewhere far, far away.

It wasn't the worst one she'd ever lived in. It was a ten minute walk to the tunnels that used to be a metro. A twenty minute ride to the hollow shell of a building she worked in. It had pale grey walls with chipping paint, and crown molding, and fake wood floors. It had one bedroom. A kitchen island. A closet door that squeaked. A wilting philodendron on the balcony, and an ice maker that had never worked, and bright sunny windows, and a handle on the bathroom faucet she'd had to jiggle to keep it from leaking.

 _It'll be okay,_ Neil had said, when news of Kijuju's collapse went public. He'd sat on the couch with her. His thumb had traced circles on her cheek. _Chris is still out there. He won't go down that easy._

He'd pressed his forehead to hers. He'd woven his fingers through hers.

 _We'll be okay. I'm here._

She'd believed him.

And he'd left her.

 _Neil had left. Chris had left. Leon Sherry Moira Barry everyone had left her._

 _Everyone was gone._

 _They weren't coming back._

The world outside was deathly quiet. For a while, it had been a wild roar of noise - curfew sirens, emergency broadcasts, supply drops, desperate phone calls and frantic arguments carrying through the thin apartment walls. A constant pounding in her temples.

Now all she could hear was her own breath rattling in her lungs, as loud as hurricane winds.

She couldn't survive this.

The gun - the one she'd stared down at, the one she had ready with a full clip, the one that sat heavy and useless in her hand while people died screaming - still hung from her hip. She swore she could feel it burning her skin.

She would also swear she hadn't pulled it from its holster. But it was in her hands again. A familiar weight. An easy grip.

 _She couldn't survive this._

 _Nobody could._

She moved like she was knee-deep in a swamp. Like vines tangled around her arms, around her torso, around her neck. Like the dark, wet earth pulled her down deeper with each struggling movement.

She could barely breathe as she raised it to her temple.

The metal was cool against her skin. Her arm shook.

From the bookshelf across the room, cat-eyes stared her down. Unnervingly large, flashing yellow and green and yellow in the dark.

She wondered - distantly, like the thought came from somewhere outside herself - how long it would be before Shadow ate her corpse.

 _It might not work._

 _It would._

She inhaled. Her chest tightened. Her lungs burned.

 _Someone might come._

 _No one was coming._

She exhaled. The breath shook with something that sounded like a sob.

 _It would hurt._

 _Not for long._

She closed her eyes. She didn't feel a sense of calm. Of easy, peaceful acceptance.

She felt like she was going to die.

 _No one was getting out of this alive. Better to end it now. Quick and clean and quiet, not knowing what comes next._

 _Now._

Three.

 _don't think, don't think, stop thinking, just do it, there's nothing here, there's nothing left, please, anyone, anything, please_

Two.

 _someone might come, someone might, the world was dead, dying, everyone was gone, someone might be out there, someone might be looking, someone might, please, please, please_

One...

A knock on the door shattered the silence. Three sharp, echoing raps.

She froze, finger still poised on the trigger.

* * *

 _ **Four Weeks From the Incident**_

Thunder rumbled over the Pacific, threatening a storm that would never quite make it ashore. A warm, misty rain blanketed the island, obscuring the tall forested hills in the near-distance. The drizzling rain wet Claire's skin like dew, it curled the fine wispy hairs around her upturned face. It was cool enough that she wasn't sweating, but warm enough to be balmy.

It was a beautiful, lazy sort of day.

Rebecca had tried, unsuccessfully, to rally some troops to do something in the kitchen. She promised cookies to her victims; not one of them took the bait. No meaningful work would be done that day, and it was exactly the break they all needed.

Claire passed Chris on her way across the resort. He was sleeping off a hangover in a hammock near the beach, a fishing hat draped over his face. Moira and Sherry walked the receding shore, picking up shells. Claire could hear their banter and laughter.

She looked up to the dark horizon as she walked down the plank path, her laundry basket set on her hip, the constant _clip-clop_ of her sandals on the sea wood like a steady tattoo. She squinted at the ominous, rolling clouds ahead.

Her life seemed then to hang in a perfect balance. Precariously on the cusp of something enormous… perhaps positive, perhaps not. She couldn't describe it, had no words for it… but something was about to change, one way or another.

She just knew.

* * *

Wesker was the only one in the resort laundromat. Slumped in a chair, his long legs spidered out in front of him, a worn book butterflied over his thigh. He licked his thumb and turned a page, not even bothering to look up when the screen door creaked open.

 _Don't, Claire. Do not._

Her heart pounded hard in her chest at the first sight of him. She _almost_ hesitated on the threshold, but it was too late to turn around, it was too late to keep walking, it was too late for anything else. She steeled herself and stepped over his foot, went straight to the only machine that didn't sound like a giant rock tumbler when it was over-filled.

They were alone in there. The two of them. No one else around. They hadn't been alone since...

 _Don't look. Do not… under any circumstances… look at him._

She shoveled her dirty clothes in and spread a generous amount of powdered detergent over the top, her stomach in her throat. She set the machine, maybe, _hopefully_ , but her hands shook so much she couldn't be sure, and she could barely see straight, and then -

He was directly behind her, so close her nose brushed his chest when she turned.

She very nearly screamed. Her body reacted, all the years of choosing fight over flight paying off in that single instant, and her hands slammed against his chest, pushing as hard as she could.

If he had been human, he would have been sent sailing backwards over the row of dryers in the middle of the laundromat. If he had been human, the air would have been forced from his lungs and he would have been doubled over, gasping like a fish out of water. If he had been human…

But he wasn't. He wasn't human _at all_. And he didn't budge an inch.

Before she could dodge around him, he'd placed both hands flat on the washing machines, caging her in. She could feel the heat of his forearms on either side of her head.

She was trapped.

Her body trembled. Her thoughts stuttered and then ceased altogether, but she willed her eyes up until her gaze met his.

He took a deep, centering breath. "I want you…to stop _looking_ at me." He didn't blink. "I want you to stop _thinking_ about me…I want you out of my personal space, out of my line of sight...out of my way...entirely." He spoke through clenched teeth, his words growing tighter with each sentence. "I can feel your beady little eyes following me. _Everywhere._ It's violating. It's desperate. It's disgusting. Do you understand? Yes?" He nodded at her slowly, as if she'd miss the point.

As if she was just another idiot.

She was quiet for a moment, staring up at him. And looking into his eyes - his sneer, his _disgust -_ she bristled.

She felt something rising up in her, rippling, nearly roaring. The same monster that reared its head whenever someone told her she was wrong. Told her to stop. Told her to slow down.

Made her feel _stupid._

She'd spent an agonizing month dodging, ducking, regretting. Reliving that incident again, and again, and again, wallowing in self-pity. She'd spent a month _feeling_ disgusting. She'd spent weeks before that watching the world unravel around her, watching society collapse brick by brick, murder by murder.

 _He'd_ caused this. It wasn't his stupid fucking virus, but he'd started it all.

 _He_ was the reason she was here.

The reason any of them were here.

The reason these _disgusting_ things were happening.

If she had been like any other woman, she would have cried, humiliated and shamed at his words. If she had been like any other woman, she would have dropped to her knees in terror and promised to do everything he'd asked. If she had been any other woman…

But she wasn't any other woman. _At all_.

She stood up to her full height, her face very close to his. She felt him tense, felt him shift his weight - a micro-submission.

She caught herself before she laughed out loud.

 _Look at him. Keep looking. Don't stop._

"I know…" she started, taking a step closer to him.

His arms fell away and he took a step back.

"...that you can smell me," she continued. Another step. "And I'm pretty sure I'm fertile."

 _Keep looking. Don't stop._

He bumped up against one of the dryers, stumbled over his own feet.

"And you know…" she smiled, "...that I'm going to have to _fuck_ you again very soon."

He scowled at her, shaking his head. " _Vile_ ," was all he could manage.

She felt her smile pull tighter, baring her teeth. "And I think you're worried. I think you're afraid I might trick you like I did before."

He scoffed.

For a moment - for a beautiful, _glorious_ moment, one that she was sure she'd remember forever - she watched him struggle for words.

She waited. He didn't scramble. Didn't stutter. He just stood very still, and the muscle in his jaw clenched, working at something intangible.

Then he hissed: "Keep your fantasies to yourself, Miss Redfield."

Abruptly, he headed for the door, in full retreat.

"You want me to fold your clothes now too?" she called after him, her voice still very bold.

When he was out of sight, she sagged against the washers, the fiery thing inside of her extinguished in an instant. She was left panting, sweating, trembling, and the vibrations of the machines coursed through her like the adrenaline that pumped in her blood. Her hands shook uncontrollably.

She had bested him, in that moment. She'd _won._

But she knew he wouldn't leave her challenge unanswered for long.


	4. Green Apple

**Chapter Four: Green Apple**

 _"From a little spark may burst a flame."_

 _-Dante Alighieri, "Paradiso"_

He hadn't planned on letting himself in. It was not something he had actively _premeditated_.

But she wasn't in her villa, and the door was unlocked. In fact, _all_ of their doors were unlocked. He knew, because he'd tried them all, one after the other.

 _Idiots._

The front door closed quietly behind him. He took six soundless steps down the little hallway, and then glanced around.

The layout was exactly like his. A full bath near the entrance. A stainless steel kitchenette to the right. An eat-in granite bar. A step down to a lounge space, and a step up to the raised canopy bed, with French doors opening out to the sparkling pool and the rolling blue-grey sea.

Exactly like his. Identical. But a bit more...lived-in, perhaps.

Little bits of clutter were scattered all around. A crumpled plastic wrapper and a ceramic mug with a coffee-stained rim sat on the countertop. Some sandals had been haphazardly kicked off by the door. A tube of sunscreen, covered in smudges and fingerprints, sat on the ornate console table, with a pair of black cat-eye sunglasses next to it.

Her bed hadn't been made that morning. After their... _time together,_ he'd been shocked - suspicious, even - to come back to his villa in the muggy afternoon, and find the linens piled neatly in the middle of his bed. She didn't seem nearly as conscientious about her own quarters. The duvet was crooked, hanging too low on one side. The pillows were in a messy pile. A decorative, tasseled one had fallen to the floor.

He stepped up towards the bed, bending to pick up the pillow. He dusted it off and tossed it back into the pile.

To his left, there was the same warm wooden chest of drawers, lined up beneath the same gold-plated mirror. The top drawer was wedged open, a bit of fabric sticking out.

Her hairbrush sat on top, with three elastic ties scattered around. It was simple, cheap and plastic, with strands of auburn hair stuck in the bristles. He reached out, unthinkingly, and touched the handle, turning it so it was flush with the edge of the dresser. He moved the ties next to it - also tangled with hair - one by one.

He reached for the top drawer, with its intricate brass handles, and gave it a firm tug. The offending article of clothing came loose, slipping back inside.

It was full to the brim with a messy assortment of things. Mostly undergarments, all thrown together into an indiscriminate pile. Unfolded, unsorted.

She was not a _meticulous_ girl, to say the absolute least.

He sighed, staring down at the chaos. He certainly hadn't let himself inside with the intention of cleaning up after her, but...

He spent a moment shuffling through the drawer, shifting the contents around to prevent any further obstructions. He untangled a few of the articles - mostly simple things, grey and white, soft and well-worn. Nothing... _seductive,_ but with each touch, he felt something rising in his blood.

And then, at the bottom of the drawer, a bra. One that Jill had grabbed during the frantic sweep of the girl's apartment, as she filled the duffel bag with supplies. He pulled it from the drawer, holding it up in the fading light of the room. It was a thoroughly impractical thing - emerald green, sheer, covered in elegant lacework. Heavily padded, undoubtedly meant to lift the chest, accentuate the curve and the swell of her cleavage…

Something she'd worn for other men, before The End. Something they'd hastily pulled off, dropped to the floor without a second thought.

The green would have looked striking against her freckled skin and amber hair.

He set it back in the drawer. Buried it beneath a layer of unassuming cotton and spandex and…

His fingers had curled around the black sports bra before he realized it. The one she'd worn when she'd come to his villa, barely sober enough to stand. The one she'd slept in, sprawled across his couch. The one she'd removed, eyelet by metal eyelet, breasts straining at the fabric, all porcelain skin and welcoming warmth and indescribable softness.

The one she'd worn for him.

He dropped it, slamming the drawer closed, narrowly missing his fingers as he pulled his hand away. He couldn't shake that vision. _The_ vision. Her, above him in the white-gold morning light, straddling him, sinking onto him, bright blue eyes fluttering closed as she took his hands, urging him to touch her…

His fingers clenched to a fist.

His mouth felt dry.

His lungs, his chest, his _groin_ all felt far too tight.

He turned away from the intricate dresser and the beautiful bed. He wandered in a vague circle around the villa. The sun was finally sinking below the horizon, spilling through the windows, painting the room with glowing red rays. Though the buildings were positioned the same, and the sun cast its predictable light across the same basic furniture, the same wooden floors...this place felt warmer, somehow, than his own villa.

Unwashed dishes in the sink. A collection of pale seashells and cracked sand dollars on the breakfast counter. A towel hanging on the edge of the laundry hamper, just inside the bathroom door.

He walked towards it, gathering up the towel and pushing it into the bin. It was still damp from her morning shower, and lightly scented. A crisp, clean smell - not particularly cloying, nothing floral or sugary.

He crossed the room to the shower - all glass with a waterfall head. It was still open. There were three little bottles on the shelf, within arm's reach of the door.

He picked one up. _Desert Essence Green Apple and Ginger Shampoos._ Nearly half-empty. He set it back down on the shelf. Took three steps away, towards the main living space.

And then he turned, and the bottle was somehow in his hand again, and he'd flipped the top open, holding it just beneath his nose, inhaling deeply.

Completely unbidden, completely beyond his control, the thought flashed across his mind, a wild tangle of sense and image and feeling: _it's like a meadow._

He froze. The words seemed to hover before him, a cloud of gnats.

This was pathetic.

Absolutely _pathetic._ He felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. He tightened his grip on the bottle, enough so that a dollop of the shampoo went rolling down the side, landing squarely on his wrist.

He recoiled like the stuff was made of acid.

He slammed the bottle back onto the shelf. Turned towards the faucet, yanking the handle. Scalding hot water rushed out, and he scrubbed his hand furiously...and pointedly ignored the wide, well-lit mirror that hung before him.

 _He was not a soft man. He was not a weak man. He was not...swept away by...by idle thoughts, daydreams, useless drivel…_

He jerked the hand towel down, so forcefully he might have pulled the bar from the wall, had it happened a few months ago. He dried his hands, wadding it up, tossing it in the direction of the hamper.

He didn't bother to look where it had landed as he passed.

The villa had grown dimmer, the sky fading to a deep shade of blue. She'd be returning soon. He needed to compose himself. He needed the upper hand tonight. He needed to control the situation...to control her...to control _himself._

He stormed back to the lounge, straight to the loveseat, throwing the little decorative pillows and bolsters aside, and dropping down. He sank into the cushions, the leather squeaking under his weight. His legs crossed and uncrossed at the ankle, and every muscle in his body fairly jumped with unspent energy. He forced himself to lean back against the plush cushions, trained his eyes squarely on the door - _nowhere else. No more exploring. Nothing._

 _Just wait._

And he waited.

* * *

The walk back to her villa was quiet.

She was one of the last to leave the rotunda. They'd spent the evening eating, talking, watching the sky fade darker and darker, reveling in the cool air and soft breezes that came with the setting of the sun.

It had been a relaxing time. Loose and comfortable, warm and familiar. The kind of night she'd nearly begun to look forward to, after months of terror and uncertainty.

 _Not that things were any easier now,_ she thought, frowning to herself. Over the past few weeks, the group seemed to have formed a kind of unspoken pact: they'd delicately ignored their _purpose_ here. While it always hovered around them, coloring the edges of every task, of every meeting, of every decision...no one mentioned it. No one asked about it. No one pried, no one pushed.

Until tonight.

The moon had risen, shimmering off the ocean as she walked down pier. The afternoon's conversation followed her like a ghost, while her footsteps echoed off the planks.

" _I miss Australia," Rebecca said. She brushed sand off her foot._

 _Claire tilted her head. She arched an eyebrow. "Australia?"_

 _"Yeah."_

 _She narrowed her eyes. "You miss...Australia. Out of everything."_

 _"I miss other stuff too," Rebecca said, bristling a little. "But it's pretty high on the list. Like...koalas, yeah? Do you think they're okay?"_

 _"Oh my god." Claire turned back, determined not to dignify that with an answer. Beside her, Sheva rested her chin on her knees, pulled up to her chest. The little group stared quietly out at the ocean. At the horizon, the water met the sky in a blur of color, a wild blaze of pink and violet and crimson red._

" _I miss a lot of shit," Sheva mumbled. "Beef. Chicken." She raised her eyebrows and nodded to herself. "Pork."_

" _Hot dogs," Claire added._

 _"No. No, no, no." Rebecca swiveled towards her abruptly, casting an accusatory glare. "You give me shit about koalas, and you miss_ hot dogs?"

" _You got a problem with that?"_

 _"Just that they're_ disgusting," _the girl snorted. She wrinkled her nose. "They barely count as food."_

 _"Oh, they're food. I could probably eat fifteen right now." Claire leaned back, digging her palms into the sand. "Grilled. Burned the fuck up."_

" _That's so gross," Sheva mumbled into her knees._

 _"Right. Sorry. Too trashy. I forgot where we were." Claire cleared her throat, sitting up a little straighter. "I miss white truffle butter. And...locally sourced...saffron essence…"_

 _"Stop." Sheva laughed. "You don't even know what that is."_

" _On the bright side, we've got enough Ramen to choke a horse," Rebecca said, falsely chipper. "We haven't even busted out the shrimp flavor yet."_

 _"Yeah. There's a good reason for that," Claire muttered._

 _"It's better than hot dogs."_

 _"It is absolutely, positively not…"_

 _Jill sat alongside them, soundless and strange, as they bickered. Everyone in the group had grown accustomed to her quiet existence. She worked and sweated and lived alongside them from dawn to dusk, but rarely spoke to anyone._

 _After a while, they'd all stopped trying._

" _I was kinda seeing a guy, at the University." Rebecca sighed wistfully. "I sort of miss him."_

 _"More or less than Australia?" Sheva asked._

 _She narrowed her eyes, feigning contemplation. "A little less, maybe."_

 _"Ah. That's a shame." Sheva drew a looping figure eight in the sand with her fingertip. "Was he the the last person you slept with?"_

 _Rebecca inhaled sharply, eyes widening. "I'm sorry,_ what?"

 _"You heard me." Sheva stared down at the pattern as she traced it again and again. "If your last time was a bad one…"_

 _Rebecca put a hand over her chest, feigning shock. She shook her head dramatically, her hair falling out of her eyes. "Are you suggesting -"_

" _Yes," both Claire and Sheva replied._

" _He was too young for me, ladies. Way,_ way _too young. And if you think I'd ever..._ ever _do that...with a student…" Rebecca pointed at them both, scolding. The corner of her lips twitched, betraying a laugh._

" _He was one of your_ students _?" Sheva asked, guffawing, her mouth in a wide, open smile._

" _He might have been. At one point." Her lips quivered in a suppressed smile as she slipped her over-sized sunglasses back on. "So strange…I can't seem to remember now."_

 _Claire waved her hand dismissively. "Big youthful dick is never any good, anyway. Nobody needs that. Good riddance."_

 _"Were you seeing anyone?" Sheva turned towards Claire, smirking. Rebecca turned too._

 _Claire squinted out at the low, orange orb of the sun. She swallowed. She shifted in the sand._

 _"No," she said, after a moment. Her voice felt a little too quiet._

 _Sheva nodded. "Better no dick than bad dick at the end, yeah?"_

 _"Oh my_ god." _Rebecca tossed her head back, rolling her eyes up at the darkening sky. "It wasn't bad dick-"_

 _"So you_ did _sleep with him."_

 _"I didn't say that! I just...mean that we…"_

 _Their voices faded to a dull hum, matching the roar of the waves. Claire inhaled slowly, rolling her shoulders. She hadn't thought of Neil in...a while. In too long. And they weren't seeing one another, really. They were...doing something. They were on, and off, and on, and off, and then finally crashing together at The End, desperately clinging to one another, nails like claws, making promises that tasted like alcohol and sounded like lies. Saying they'd take care of one another, saying they'd be fine, saying they wouldn't be alone or afraid or hurt or lost or..._

" _Hey." Sheva looked around, her eyes suddenly narrowing. "Has he told anyone yet?"_

 _Claire blinked, pulled back into the conversation. She frowned. "Has who done what?"_

" _You know_ who." _Sheva tossed her head in the direction of the villas._

 _They all turned in time to see Wesker heading to the resort dining hall. His button-down shirt was open, blowing wide in the light breeze, and he was wearing what looked like a pair of Birkenstocks, walking with a book tucked under his arm._

 _It still startled Claire to see him so...casual. She coughed a little, turning away._

" _He hasn't said a goddamn word to me," Rebecca said under her breath, kissing her hand and holding it up reverently. "Thank you, Jesus."_

" _Jill?" Sheva asked._

 _Jill looked up. She was all glassy eyes and pale, thin lips, but she shook her head slowly._

" _And not you either, Redfield?" Sheva turned to Claire._

" _God, no. What the fuck?" She shook her head adamantly, loose hair from her ponytail falling across her face. She lifted her hands from the sand - suddenly sweaty - and wiped them on her shorts. She tucked the hair back behind her ear, quickly, so that they wouldn't see her hand tremble. "I'd...I mean...I'd have to kill myself, or something. I'd have to. You'd know if it was me. You'd find me hanging by a Gucci belt in that giant-ass shower."_

 _"I feel you," Rebecca muttered._

" _So then who is it then? Who's the lucky breeder?" Sheva paused. "You think it's Sherry? She's got powers like him, right?"_

" _No way." Rebecca frowned. "Sherry would have told us all eighty-five times by now. Maybe he forgot about it? He's old as hell. Senile-ass…blond...bastard," she muttered, trailing off into incoherence._

" _Correct, Dr. Chambers. He's definitely not one of your_ barely legal _students," Sheva began to laugh again. And just like that, the mood lightened._

 _The two of them bantered back and forth about the possibilities -_ surely not Moira, she's so young, I wonder why he hasn't told anyone yet, maybe he hates us all too much, I bet it's gonna be me, I've never even won a raffle before but watch this be my big lucky break, this shit's just like "The Lottery", did you guys ever read that in school - _and Claire turned to Jill._

 _She was already watching Claire. Her hair, a darker shade of dirty blond now, drifted around her face in thin wisps. Her expression was unreadable - as blank as a sheet of drywall - and she didn't say a word._

 _But she watched Claire._

 _She watched. Unflinching. Unfazed._

 _She watched, and she knew._

 _Claire looked away._

" _Alright. It's dinner time, ladies! Better hurry and get you some of them beef-flavored_ Ray-men _noodles while they last," Rebecca drawled in a fake Southern accent. She stood, patting sand off her little shorts. Sheva reached up. Rebecca grabbed her hands, barely pulling her to standing, the both of them nearly toppling into the sand, their laughter carrying down the beach as they walked away._

 _Claire felt Jill's eyes lingering on her as she stood, following their path up to the resort._

It couldn't stay a secret forever. She frowned as she neared her villa. He'd certainly been quiet recently... _too_ quiet after the lovely moment they shared in the laundry room. She'd expected some kind of retaliation by now. Some kind of precise, pointed attack. Some kind of _response._ But two days had come and gone, and she'd barely seen him.

Maybe he _had_ moved on.

She strode towards the front door, suddenly full of agitation. She was fertile. She had to be. She absolutely was. And he hadn't said a single word about it. Hadn't made any plans. And while he was a lot of things...a lot of awful, upsetting, horrible things...he wasn't the kind to let a plan unfold itself.

Her fingers wrapped around the handle, giving the door a firm push.

If they were going to do this again...if he hadn't decided to try someone else...he would have told her when to meet him. Where to meet him. How to meet him. What to eat. How to sit. How loudly to talk, how loudly to breathe, how quickly to move, to create the _prime environment_ for conception.

He would have everything in line by now.

But he didn't.

 _It was Jill._ The thought hit her like a ton of bricks, knocking the air from her lungs, as the door swung open into darkness.

It was the only thing that made any sense.

It had to be Jill. Silent, shell-of-herself Jill. She wouldn't say a word about it. She wouldn't let on at all. He'd go to her whenever she was _ready,_ and no one would ever know.

She glared as she stomped into the lounge, slamming the door behind her.

 _He'd meet her in her villa...maybe he'd be on top, as broken as she was now. Maybe she wouldn't move at all. Maybe he'd be gentle with her. Maybe they'd fall into some kind of old, familiar rhythm, him and her, after years together. Maybe he knew every inch of her body. Maybe he would make her come. Maybe he'd touch her like she was made of glass, like he'd never touched a woman before, like she was the center of his universe for ten minutes, or half an hour, or the entire night, however long they took, and it would work, and he'd have what he wanted, and…_

She fumbled for the lightswitch above the little console table, flipping it on. She blinked, eyes adjusting to the sudden brightness.

He was sitting on the couch.

Her heart shivered. Stuttered. Lurched in her chest.

He was here. Unannounced, lounging in the darkness like some kind of great jungle cat, curved fangs glinting beneath the villa lights.

He was here, lurking in the shadows, waiting for her to return...because it hadn't worked the first time. When he'd been careful. When he'd been...gentle.

He hadn't hurt her. And nothing had come of it.

 _This was it._

She stared at him. Watched him the way she might watch a shining black scorpion in the corner of the room.

She swallowed. She tilted her chin up. She squared her shoulders, taking a deep breath.

She'd speak first. If this was really, truly it...she'd at least let herself have that much.

"You're going to hurt me, aren't you?" she asked. Her voice was strangely even, though it sounded very distant.

She wasn't sure why she'd asked that. What kind of answer she was expecting. A sneer, maybe. His eyes boring into her, all raw red fury. His hands around her throat, fingers tightening while she tried to scream, tried to struggle.

Instead, he smiled.

It was a...strange smile. Not threatening. Not mocking.

 _Condescending._

She balled her hand to a fist at her side. _It had all been a trick, from the very start. It had all been a game. The hesitation, the uncertainty, the softness. Letting her feel bold. Letting her feel_ safe. _He'd toyed with her, like she was a little grey mouse caught in his claws, and now he was here to finish her off._

And he was enough of a monster to smile about it.

"Get up and do it, then." Her voice was a quiet hiss. She hoped - _prayed_ \- she could keep it that way. That she could bite her tongue until it bled, choking back her cries. Or maybe he'd be thoughtful enough to cover her mouth, and keep the others from hearing.

He didn't get up. He lowered the arm that was stretched across the back of the couch. The peculiar smile stayed wedged in place.

"Don't fuck with me," she whispered. The air in the room seemed thin. She sucked in another breath through clenched teeth. "Just...do what you came to do. Get it over with."

"We'll get to that eventually," he said, and it sounded like a sigh. He ran a hand over his hair - it was loose and full, unmanicured. She watched him touch it. "I believe… we should discuss something first."

She ground her teeth. "You wanna... _discuss_ something," she mocked. "Seriously? You wanna talk now?"

He looked unimpressed. He leaned forward, rubbing his face and resting his elbows on his widespread knees. "Miss Redfield. Do you know what your closest mammalian cousin is?"

She snorted, crossing her arms. "Oh my god…"

He ignored her. "It's a primate called a bonobo. They're certainly...unique, among most animals. They copulate for pleasure. To solidify social contracts. Not simply for reproduction." His knee bounced lightly as he spoke. "They adopt face-to-face sexual positions. They may even orgasm."

She stood very still, her eyebrows furrowing.

"When bonobos _are_ fertile, they mate more frequently." He paused. "On a curious note, the more willing the female, the more easily and often she conceives."

Her jaw clenched. Her back teeth ached.

"Humans are a bit more… sophisticated, of course. There's been some conflicting evidence that... _unfortunate_ circumstances may increase the odds of conception." He was staring past her, at the wall, at the door. He shook his head, seeming to talk half to himself. "They're questionable studies. Insufficient population sizes, short trial periods...reliance on self-reporting…just sloppy science, really."

She frowned, her eyes narrowing. _What the fuck..._

He patted his thighs, as if to turn the page in his report. "In summary…the focus on my ejaculation has been misguided. It's actually your…pleasure...we should concern ourselves with."

She was silent.

He sat with both palms still pressed to his thighs.

His words hung in the air between them, a kind of haze she was certain she could nearly see, if she squinted closely enough.

"You want me...to come," she said, her voice flat.

He sighed, and scratched something on his arm. "Such a lofty goal." He glanced up at her. "Is it achievable?"

"No."

He smiled again. The same condescending shit-eating grin as before. "Right. Something a bit more realistic then. Are you able to…perhaps imagine I am someone else? Someone more palatable?"

She blinked and swallowed hard. "Pretend you're Leon? That's what you want?"

He looked away, his eyes hard, suddenly unreadable. He'd abandoned the egotistical smirk at the mention of Leon's name. "It's not about _what I want_. It's about tricking your own body the way you tricked mine."

They stared warily at each other across the space.

"Well?" he asked, voice teetering on the edge of impatience.

"I need to shower first." She looked away, walking towards the bathroom with her stomach in her throat.

* * *

He watched as she emerged from the bathroom. She wore nothing but an oversized t-shirt, hanging off one freckled shoulder.

His eyes followed her every move. She ignored him where he sat on her bed, and went into the kitchen, scrunching her hair dry with a towel. It was dark when it was wet. Not at all like the coppery waves that had tumbled down her back in a crooked, messy ponytail, sticking to his skin, brushing against his lips...

On tip-toe, she reached into a cupboard for a blue glass. The shirt rode up, exposing the elastic of her blue panties, cutting into the back of her thigh, just below the cheek of her —

He looked away quickly, his jaw tensing.

The refrigerator door opened and closed.

"Want anything to drink?" she asked, her voice controlled and stiff.

 _Yes._

"No. Thank you."

He heard the beautiful wood floors creak under her feet as she walked past him, around the great bed, to the other side. She set the glass down on the side table. From the corner of his eye, he watched her.

He swallowed. "No wine tonight," he remarked. His nervous hand twitched in the direction of her drink; the glass was half-full with water.

She took a deep breath. "I'm gonna try this sober."

He nodded, feeling his pulse race throughout his entire body. His skin was alive, was trembling in time with the terrified beating of his heart.

"You're wearing… a lot of cologne," she said then, the both of them still staring straight ahead.

His breath caught. His teeth ground together.

 _A lot of cologne._

 _You're wearing_ a lot _of cologne._

He had thought...it might make things more _pleasant_ for her, if he tried to appear put-together...

The fingers on his left hand jerked, almost reflexively.

She had the audacity...the _nerve..._ to mention it. Out loud. To say something, as though he'd...he'd _preened_ for her. As though he'd done more than dash some on as an afterthought. It was a simple, basic courtesy. It was a gesture of civility. It was meant to make this all feel more _normal,_ it was a way of softening the edges of their damned _circumstances…what kind of desperate fool did she think him in her perverse little —_

"It's nice," she said casually, combing through her wet hair with her fingers.

He blinked.

He looked down at his hands, folded neatly in his lap.

 _It's nice._

He hated the way his anger dissipated in the wake of those two words. As if she'd licked her fingertips and snuffed out a candle.

 _It's nice._

He hated the relief that brought him. The self-satisfaction. The _joy._

She stirred up his emotions so casually. So thoughtlessly. Like mixing a can of paint - careless and messy, _feelings_ and _thoughts_ splashing from the container and dripping down the side.

In the span of ten seconds, she could leave his mental equilibrium in ruins.

"Would you like me to turn off the lights?" He barely recognized his own voice as he asked.

"Sure," she said. She, of course, sounded firm and steady, and far too brave.

He sighed and rolled off the bed.

"So...we're gonna _really_ do this?" she asked when his back was to her.

He paused at the switch on the far wall. "I'm not sure what you mean." He turned the dimmer until the lights were very low. The villa was bathed in a soft, eerie glow. "Did we not _really do it_ last month?"

"Don't be an asshole. I _mean_ …we're going to make believe this is real? Like…touching…each other?"

He turned to her. She was sitting up at the head of her bed, a pillow in her lap, a kind of shield. She looked at him with nervous eyes, her leg bouncing under the cover.

He licked his lips. His disgusting heart pounded almost painfully in his chest. "If that feels more… _authentic_ to you, Miss Redfield, then we can…touch each other." He took a deep breath. "You'll have to teach me, of course, how you prefer to be touched. You're all so different."

She laughed to herself, looking up incredulously. "We're all so different…" she whispered. "All of us sluts…"

"All of you _humans_ ," he corrected her.

She stared at him, her features falling, suddenly very serious.

She seemed as if she might cry.

He looked down. "Would you like me to take my clothes off?"

"Whatever." She shrugged. But then…she leaned forward and pulled her own shirt over her head.

He swallowed, and his feet, his legs - willful, autonomous things - carried him, without his knowing, to the other side of the bed. She crossed her arms over her chest and glanced up at him.

He was terrified.

He had lived his life surrounded by monsters of every sort. He had faced death once before, tasted it, _embraced_ it, and returned as something new. Something changed. Something… _above_.

But this...her, her bed, the low light of her villa, the soft fragrance of her shampoo, her damp hair spilling over her dappled shoulder, her shirt so casually tossed aside, _her..._

He was somehow more than _terrified._ He was well and truly _below._

He had told himself, as he sat in the gathering dark, that he would be in control. Complete control. Tightly-reined, steel-gripped, unflinching _control,_ all throughout the night. But as he stood before her, he felt the same changes - undisciplined and feeble and disgustingly human - overtake his body one by one. Blood warming, blood rushing, pulse rising, skin humming. Pressure growing in his groin as he hardened at the sight of her, at the _thought_ of her.

Haltingly, he grabbed the back of his own shirt and pulled. It slipped over his head, down his arms, joining hers on the floor. His hands trembled, coming to his fly.

She was watching. He knew she was watching. He could feel her eyes following his movements. She was watching him fumble with the button. Watching him strip down. Watching him make a damned fool of himself. The button snagged on a loose thread, and his hands were sweating, actually _sweating,_ fingers slipping on the metal. He had to fight to keep from swearing under his breath. It was bad enough that she could see him cracking, while she reclined half-nude against the headboard, after so gracefully shedding her top...

He stopped, his body rigid and still, his breath trapped in his lungs.

After a moment, she reached for him, leaning across the bed, and her hands patiently found what he was struggling with. Her face a mask of concentration, she undid the button at the top of his fly, and then slowly pulled down the zipper - careful and calm, tugging the material out, away from his body, so that she didn't touch his erection, so that her knuckles didn't graze the short coarse hairs of his belly. He watched. The sensation of her _undressing_ him - methodically, deliberately - was distant, and airy. He felt as if he was watching from above his own body.

Before he could stop himself, his hand…lifted, and his fingers brushed her dark, wet mane, brushed her soft cheek.

She flinched and leaned away from him. She looked _stunned_ , touching her face where he had.

The fingers of his offending hand curled in on themselves. "Not yet?" he asked, breathless and confused. _Stupid. Imbecile. Stupid, stupid, stupid..._

She stared at him. She opened her mouth as if to speak… but she did not.

His lip curled. "This is _ridiculous_ ," he sneered. He bent over, snatching his shirt off the floor.

"Wait," she said softly.

"This is not working, Miss Redfield, because you cannot seem to make up your mind -" He pushed his arms through the sleeves.

She shook her head. "Please, just stop…listen, I -"

"You ask for something more _real_ , whatever you believe _that_ means. I provide you with it, and it's still not enough to -" The shirt was backwards. He shook his head, removing it again. "It's still not enough for you to simply -"

Her palm slapped the bed, bouncing off the mattress. "Be patient!" she finally yelled at him.

He stopped, the shirt in his hands.

"Just be…patient," she said, glaring at him. They were both silent for a moment. "You tried to kill me once. It's not gonna…I can't just —"

He laughed in disbelief. "That was _years ago._ "

"You tried to fucking _kill_ me!" She lunged forward on the bed, lunged at him.

"Well, I'm not trying to fucking _kill_ you now, Claire!" he bellowed. "I'm just trying to touch you!"

He weighed his options, a split-second debate. It wasn't too late for him to leave, and let her be _for good_ , alone with all of her violence. The door was mere feet away. He could exit with his pride, graceful and cold as always. He'd lose nothing. He'd done it before; he'd walked out on women who were objectively better than her. Stunningly beautiful, obscenely wealthy, vastly smarter women.

But they weren't _Claire Redfield_.

They hadn't fought with him, hadn't struggled with him, hadn't met him blow for blow. And they certainly hadn't _terrified_ him, those superior women he'd made fools of a lifetime ago. He stared at her, saw the muscles in her lovely, pale arms well-defined, her heavy breasts quivering with each bitter breath, her wild hair like a fiery crown, and her pulse racing so hard he could see it in her throat. She was like an animal - a feral creature, something hard and fast and full of rage.

She sat back on her knees, scowling. "Do it then," she growled.

She had called to him. And weak as he was to _her_ , he had no choice but to respond.

He reached out, his fingers trembling. She watched his hand - suspicious and wary, breathing hard through her nose.

His knuckles grazed her cheek again, as if to prove a point. Her skin was soft, smooth, her cheekbones anything but delicate. She held very still as he ran the backs of his nervous fingers down the proud cut of her jaw, set tight and square; when they reached the end of her jawline, he let his fingertips drift beneath her chin, lifting it so that they looked into each other.

Her eyes flashed bright blue - arrogant and defiant - as she seemed to peer down to the bottom of him.

He wondered what she saw.

He wondered if he truly wanted to know.

With her eyes locked firmly on his, he continued, his fingers trailing down - down the slope of her chin to her pale, exposed throat. She didn't flinch away, but he felt her swallow, felt her tensing. He touched her hesitantly. Curiously.

He had touched her here before. Back then, years ago, she was rain-soaked, shivering. She was afraid, as his gloved fingers had tightened over her windpipe. She'd clawed at his wrist. She'd gasped for air.

She'd been very young. Very far from home. Very much alone.

He had... _hurt_ her. And she remembered, as her nostrils flared, as her pulse hammered beneath her skin.

 _This was a mistake,_ he thought, fingertips resting just above her sternum. He glanced down at his hand. At the rise and fall of it with each breath she took. _This was all a terrible...terrible mistake, and he should go, he should leave…_

Her clavicle was lovely in the low lighting. He traced it, a perfectly sculpted line, marveling at the way shadows pooled against her porcelain skin.

 _This was a terrible, irreparable mistake._

He kept his touch featherlight, following a line of freckles that swept along her collarbone, back towards her shoulder and neck. The hard edge of suspicion had left her gaze, and she watched him a bit more inquisitively now, her lips parting.

 _Her lips._

 _He hadn't thought of…_

 _Would she want him to…_

 _Would he be_ able _to…_

He felt her hand on his. He'd stopped at her shoulder, fingertips resting there. She covered them with her own, slight pressure guiding his hand back down. Back down the slope of her shoulder, across her bicep...down to the generous swell of her breast.

He cupped the side of it carefully, gently, nearly cradling it. He looked down at his fingers - the way they curled around and beneath her, the way her skin dimpled under their slight pressure. He tried to imagine what normal men would...what Leon had…

The tip of his tongue darted across his bottom lip, suddenly too dry. Leon would do something bold. Something self-assured. Grope her, perhaps. Knead the flesh of her breast beneath his fingers. Her nipple, still the lightest rose-pink, was very near his thumb. Leon would certainly touch it...graze it with his thumb, to roll it between his fingertips until it stiffened to a small, eager peak, fondle her so she arched up towards his hand, begging for more...

Desperate, disoriented, he looked into her face.

And he could feel the awful, pathetic _helplessness_ carved across his own.

She rose up to kneeling. She drew herself nearer to him. Her hand fell away from his, reaching out towards him. Her fingers slipped under the waistband of his loosened shorts, tugging gently, pulling him closer still. His thighs bumped against the tall sideboard, and he had no escape from her insistence, nowhere to go...and so he crawled up, up onto the mattress.

They knelt on the bed, face to face, the gauzy canopy fluttering around them as a merciful southern breeze swept through her villa.

"Take these off," she whispered, her cool fingers still in his shorts.

He nodded, and obeyed her without question.

* * *

 _[We want to take a moment to thank everyone who reads and comments, favorites and shares. This fic means so much to us so far. Thanks, too, to the quiet, reliable Claire/Wesker fans who we can always count on to follow us, like Sofistinha - we appreciate your readership. Thanks so much for your support, whatever form it takes!]_


	5. December 21st, 1997

**Chapter Five: December 21st, 1997**

 _"Remember tonight… for it is the beginning of always."_

 _-Dante Alighieri_

 _ **March 28, 2009**_

Jill hesitated.

Every time, she hesitated. She stood at the threshold, wavering, waiting, shifting her weight from one leg to the other.

It was as if she needed some kind of signal. He was never quite sure what she was searching for - not a flicker of movement through the door's peephole, or the telltale creak of floorboards as someone walked by. It was never anything so precise. But she would wait, looking and listening, taking slow, deep breaths, before finally raising her hand to rap on the door.

This time, it was more than a simple hesitation.

She chewed her bottom lip. A nervous tic. A thing he hadn't seen her do in years; the P30 had broken her of those useless habits. It had honed her, and sharpened her.

But they were both getting a little _dull_ now, in the absence of their chemical boosters. A little more human, each and every day.

And this excursion around the world had begun to wear on them.

He had anticipated difficulties with some of them. From Kennedy, who would have his guard up, a full arsenal ready. From Burton, desperate to keep what remained of his family safe.

 _Just wait,_ Jill had muttered, low and dark, as they'd climbed the tight, winding stairwell of the apartment building in D.C. Their footsteps echoed off the metal. There was little need for stealth anymore...the city had been dark for days.

He wondered, briefly, if they were already too late. If the girl had disappeared into the ruins of the world. If they'd break in to find she'd hung herself from the bathroom door.

Her name had been the first to leave Chris's lips, when he'd begged, crying on his knees. Without hesitation, his sister had been the first on his list when he made his desperate plea, signing all their lives away.

And now she would be the last of their little _missions._

 _Just wait._ Wesker frowned, mulling over the words. He hadn't seen the girl in...over a decade, now. She was a teenager back on Rockfort. She'd put up a fight - a sloppy, unfocused, untrained one, but a fight, nonetheless.

He'd kept a close eye on her over the years. She had certainly been no stranger to the world of bioterrorism. And in that time, she'd grown. She'd learned. She'd hardened herself.

She had more than a hint of her brother in her.

He sighed, reaching above Jill's head. He knocked three times on the door - hard, jolting raps against the metal. It echoed down the empty hallway. He took a deep breath, stepping away, out of view.

And he waited. One hand in his pocket, propofol injector at the ready. One hand resting on the gun at his hip...a precaution.

Jill centered herself before the peephole. She tilted her face up. She rolled one shoulder, loosened her stance.

For a moment, nothing happened.

A moment that felt far, far too long.

 _They were too late._ He rolled his eyes, slipping the injector back into his pocket. Redfield would be devastated. Useless for months to come, mourning his little sister. He wondered what they should tell him... _the apartment was empty, no trace of her? They'd broken in to find her brains splattered across the living room wall? They'd-_

There was a sudden, mad scramble on the other side of the door. Something heavy moving, dragging against the floor. Locks clicking out of place. A frantic, unintelligible cry, cursing, fingers fumbling with the knob and scratching like claws.

The apartment door swung open, so fiercely it slammed against the wall inside.

"Oh my god." The voice was thick with sobbing. "Oh my god. Jill? _Jill?"_ He couldn't see the girl, but he could hear the tremble in her words, the erratic spike of her pulse, the tightness of her breath.

"Hey...hey Claire." Jill spoke softly, gently, but detachedly. She didn't move an inch. He saw her eyes dart from the girl's face, and then nervously down - to her hands, perhaps.

 _Just wait,_ she'd told him.

 _Just wait._

There was silence. There was breath. There were creaking floors, and there was wind whipping outside the building, and…

"You're dead," the girl whispered.

Jill opened her mouth. Closed it. His fingers tightened around the grip of his gun.

"Am...am I dead? Am I dead too?"

"Claire, sweetheart...no…" Jill took a step forward, her hand raising a fraction of an inch, like she was reaching out to her old friend, to take her in her arms, and embrace her, and stroke her hair. "You aren't dead. I'm not...Chris is still…"

The little speech she'd tried to give so many times came out in halting, stuttered words. His nostrils flared as he breathed in deeply - the air from the apartment was stale and dry. The girl was covered in sweat. Pure adrenaline coursed through her veins.

The floor squeaked as she took a step away from Jill.

"No. No, you're dead. He's gone." Her voice was stronger now. Sharper. Jill's hand fell back to her side.

"I...need you to come with me, Claire," she said, very quietly. "This is hard to explain. There's...a lot you don't know, and…"

She froze mid-sentence. She stepped back. Her eyes widened in the darkness of the hall.

"No." A pointed response. No shaking. No trembling. "You're dead. I know it. I know you're dead."

"Just...listen to me…"

"Shut up!" The Redfield girl's voice echoed down the hall. "Shut the fuck up!" And Jill held both her hands up, taking another step back, eyes flashing towards where he stood-

He was on Claire in an instant.

She screamed. She screamed more loudly than he'd thought possible, high and sharp. He grabbed her, slamming her wrist against the wall two agonizing times, until she dropped the pistol she held. It clattered to the floor. Jill ran in behind him, kicking the gun away.

Wesker pinned Claire to the wall, wrenching her arm into an unnatural angle, his free hand searching for the injector. For the damned _injector._ All the while, she shrieked, clawed, bit, yowling like a wounded animal, nails catching his face, teeth sinking into the skin of his forearm. He felt the sharp sting of the cuts - something he wasn't used to, having relied on the boosters so long.

Her elbow caught his lip as she tried to slip away from him. He tasted blood.

He growled, licking the blood from his teeth, wrestling her to the floor. She tried to scramble away, fingers like talons against the slippery floor, but he pulled her back tight to him, a spider catching his prey - her back to his chest, his legs entwined with her own, holding her still.

One hand wrapped around her milky throat. She pulled at it, scratched at it, while he frantically patted his pockets, while she screamed and bucked against him and dug her elbow into his ribs, gasping for air...

"Jesus Christ! Don't hurt her!" Jill begged.

He finally found the damned hypodermic in a back pocket. He bit the cap off, spitting it out onto the floor, and swiftly sank the needle into the skin between her neck and her shoulder.

She keened, arching up violently in one last-ditch effort to free herself. She reached out, reached towards Jill, her fingertips close to her jeans. Her arm wavered, straining…

...and then it dropped as she slipped under. Her body sagged against him, limp and heavy.

For several seconds, neither he nor Jill dared to move. The only sound in the apartment was his labored breathing. He slumped against the wall, exhausted, letting his head fall back. The empty syringe rolled across the floor.

"Check for supplies," he panted, jerking his head towards Jill. More blood trickled from the gash in his lip. He raised his fingertips to the wound; they came away red.

Jill stared at him, stuck in place.

"Supplies, Valentine!" he barked, wiping his hand on the leg of his pants. He wasn't about to let her stand there and watch him bleed. Let her gawk at his open wounds, red and raw, and wonder about his new... _condition._

It had been weeks since his last injection of the PG67A/W. And now he bled like a man. Like any man.

He snarled as she nodded, turning away, headed towards the little kitchen. He waited until he heard the sound of cabinets opening, the clatter of things being moved from shelf to shelf, to try and reposition himself.

It _hurt._ Another thing he wasn't used to. He struggled to sit up straighter, and the spot where her elbow had collided with his ribs throbbed in protest. He looked down at the girl, still slumped against him...now with her eyes closed, and her face peaceful. She laid on him, her body rising and falling with each of his breaths.

She looked...terrible, to put it frankly. Her skin was sallow. Her face was hollow, sunken, with dark bags beneath her eyes. Her lips were chapped. Her hair was limp and stringy, tossed around her face, some of the ends tangled into knots.

The end of the world had worn away at her.

But in spite of that, he saw some of her brother in her. Not as much as he might have expected, but they were of the same stock...she was no frail, fragile thing. _She made that known quite well,_ he thought, flinching as he pushed himself away from the wall. He moved as if to shove Claire off his chest, but a sudden sound down the hall gave him pause.

He glanced towards the kitchen. Jill's hand went to the holster inside her jacket.

They both froze.

The sound again - a dull thud. Something landing on the floor in the other room.

Jill crept back to the living room. Wesker looked up at her, nodding expectantly.

She unbuttoned the holster and slowly pulled out her handgun. She crept down the hall in a crouch, one foot placed silently in front of the other, her arms straight as she aimed the gun at the floor.

Whatever was in the room certainly wasn't human. It knocked something over with a crash - a shattering noise that made Jill flinch. She glanced back at Wesker, still sprawled on the floor with Claire in his arms. Exasperated, he sneered at her, jerking his head towards the door.

She sighed and brought the gun up, readying herself. She reached out, slowly and carefully - the door, already partially open, gave way with a slight push.

A mangy black cat crept out, slinking around the edge of the frame. It sauntered past Jill, ran down the hall, and jumped up to walk across the back of Claire's couch. It stopped there, on the very edge, and sat, regarding its master and Wesker with a judgmental yellow stare.

Wesker watched through narrowed eyes as it groomed its paws. Then he tipped his head back against the wall, sighing heavily. Listening to Jill as she continued her sweep of the apartment. Feeling the soft brush of the girl's breath against his neck.

He closed his eyes.

At long last, they were nearly ready.

* * *

She knelt before him in the moonlight.

 _The villa lights,_ he corrected himself. In the plain, dim villa lights hanging overhead. They were dull. They were yellow.

He wished, desperately, that he had turned them lower. Turned them off. Shattered the bulbs and drawn the blinds and left the room as black as ink. Because this - this moment, where they stared at one another on her bed, and he pitched forward awkwardly as the mattress dipped between them - left him feeling as if a spotlight shone down on him, bright white and blistering hot, baring everything.

It seemed to shine on her as well.

She was...bolder than him. Wearing nothing but the simple blue panties, she sat back on her heels, and regarded him carefully.

She certainly wasn't the frightened thing he'd found in the claustrophobic apartment months ago; no longer ghostly pale and sunken and skittish. The heavy tropical sun had darkened her freckles, and left a low-scooping line where the neck of her tank top normally rested against her chest. It had brightened her hair, and strands of gold caught the low light above her. It had colored her cheeks, and left her smelling like salt and soft island air.

She seemed to blossom beneath it.

 _She was fertile._ That was all. He ground his molars together, focusing on that tiny, tangible detail. She was a fertile woman, pheromones seeping from her like perfume. The whole of her body was designed to make him react this way - to entice him, to ensnare him.

It was nothing unique to her. Biology. Evolution. An unremarkable human body, performing an unremarkable cycle...

She inhaled heavily. Her shoulders moved with the breath.

Her breasts followed her shoulders.

Up.

Down.

He swallowed. His tongue felt like hardened, cracked clay. "Should I...or, would you...like me to…"

She shifted slightly, leaning towards him. Her hair, still damp, fell across her shoulder, across the dip of her collarbone and the swell of her cleavage.

Her fingertips brushed his forearm.

He jolted at the contact - so light he thought he might have imagined it.

She kept her eyes locked on his. They were a fierce, flickering blue. Not the quiet, crystalline blue he'd grown so used to with Jill. Not the glacial, frozen blue he'd seen in his own mirror so many years ago. Claire Redfield's eyes were a _biting_ kind of blue, deep and wild. The heart of a flame.

And she stared at him. Into him. Through him.

He couldn't help but stare back.

 _Evolution,_ he told himself again, as she moved slowly, and very carefully, her fingertips tracing a deliberate trail along the slope of his muscle. _Evolution._ A basic, primitive urge, buried in the darkest parts of their hindbrains, woven into the fabric of their genetics.

She was striking, yes. But any woman would be. Any woman who was healthy, and young, and ripe, and ready. Any woman with any color of eyes, any color of hair, any peculiarly strong nose, any full lower lip, any sharp jaw and soft throat and heavy breasts and…

He inhaled deeply when she touched his face.

He hadn't noticed her touch leaving his arm.

He hadn't noticed her reaching out to him.

He did notice the slight...very slight...tremor in her hand, as her fingertips rested against his jaw.

He watched her lips as she spoke. Her voice was vague and distant, lost behind the heavy, leaping thrum of his pulse, but her words were very clear.

 _Don't be afraid,_ she said.

She was soft and cool and gentle. Her index finger slipped a fraction of an inch, dragging down the line of his chin.

Her thumb traced the corner of his mouth.

And with that - as if he were possessed, as if his body was made of gears and springs and wires all beyond his control - he touched her.

She didn't flinch away when his hand found the curve of her hip. He rested it there, just above the elastic band of her panties, along the gentle contour of her bones.

Her hand dropped from his face, down to the ridge of his shoulder. Down further to the plane of his chest, settling near his sternum.

It became a kind of call and response - his hand tracing the hourglass valley of her waist. Her fingers brushing across the jut of his clavicle. Her hand sweeping down his torso, over his ribs. His fingers snaking behind her, following the arc of her spine, finding the beautiful dimples of her lower back.

She touched him hesitantly, the barest strokes against skin that felt as if it were on fire. Touches that felt like flint sparking against steel. The whole of his body trembled with each new path she found. Every nerve shivered beneath her fingertips. He ached as his need grew - as it spread through his flesh and his bones and the core of his marrow. He ached with the need to touch more of her, to hold more of her. For her to touch more of _him._ For the coy gentleness to melt away in the face of something feral, something roaring. Something that echoed all through the soft shape of her body, calling to him.

A silent, steady call.

Neither of them spoke. There were sounds - rustling fabric and short tight breaths and the rushing sea outside the windows - but beyond that, the world seemed to have halted around them. It was held tight and still by the same humid night air that wound about their bodies like vines.

His hand found purchase on her hip again, resting against the comforting swell of it. Her skin was still damp from the shower.

Her hand drifted lower. Her fingertips grazed the taut muscles of his abdomen. Just above… _almost_ …

Involuntarily, his cock jumped. He nearly gasped at it, _she_ nearly gasped at it. A humiliating drop of pre-ejaculate gathered at the slit and pooled in the hood of his foreskin. It was embarrassing. It was _infuriating._ It was all because of the proximity of her hand...of her cool-warmth, of her body pressed so near to him, and still not _on_ his, where he so desperately, weakly, pitifully wanted it to be. His breathing became shallow.

He watched her. He _watched_ her like she was some preternatural thing - like she was ephemeral, fleeting, nothing but pale light filtered through a fine mist.

And she looked as if she couldn't quite believe she was here again. _Here,_ on the bed, nearly nude, his hands on her.

Her bright blue eyes were wide. Her brows were raised. Her lips were parted in the slightest questioning pout.

"Can I touch you?" she asked, barely a breath.

He swallowed, disoriented, trying to keep up, as her hand caressed his stomach, as his muscles fluttered and twitched. It was a simple question. Four words. Only four of them. He struggled to snap them together, to turn them the right direction. They were puzzle pieces in his hands, edges bent and torn and woefully mismatched. He couldn't make sense of them.

 _Can I touch you._

"What?" he whispered, dazed.

He watched her eyes dart away from his.

He watched the edge of a tooth catch her bottom lip, worrying the soft pink skin.

He watched her take a slow, long breath of air, and hold it in her lungs. Her shoulders drew back as she inhaled.

And the very tips of her fingers traced the neat line of short blond hair on his lower belly. He stared at her hand, his mouth open, lips throbbing. He knew what was coming; he understood it on the most basic, animal level...

...but he gasped as her hand closed around his cock. He grabbed her wrist - a reflex. A hardwired response. His pulse pounded in his temples. His skin stung.

 _Look at your ugly little prick…getting hard, boy?_ The old voice echoed in his head. Always there. Usually quiet. Usually a dim murmur, lost behind a thousand other noises.

Now, it was loud enough to shatter him.

Her fingers curled around his girth, unaware of the way his chest seized, the way his heart hammered behind his ribs. She pressed against the underside of him, her thumb stroking the top of his length.

He squeezed her wrist, wincing at the new sensation. Recoiling from her touch. The voice sunk its teeth into him with steel-trap jaws. _Finally starting to grow some hair...that's a shame..._

"Shh…" She soothed him, as though she could hear it too.

He looked into her eyes, panicked and breathless. The hand between his legs loosened its grip. Her other hand rose to his face again, cradling his hot cheek.

 _Going to cry again, are you? Don't like the way that feels?_

The words were hazy and distant, and as clear and cutting as shards of glass.

He turned to her hand, let her run her fingertips over his eyebrow, down the edge of his hairline. He breathed hard and nuzzled her palm.

 _There you go. Don't need to make this any harder on yourself...wouldn't want to hurt you..._

"Let me touch you," she whispered, her pupils enormous and full in the low light.

He wanted to trust her. He wanted to let her do whatever she pleased with him. He wanted to...

 _Best enjoy it while you can...won't be many people willing to touch you..._

He bit down hard on the inside of his cheek, ignoring the way his stomach churned. His body felt raw and rigid, a disgusting, flayed thing. All wet muscle and stringy sinew, quivering for everyone to see. He swallowed the urge to cry out. He choked on it.

The voice hovered like a billowing cloud of smoke. His ears rang with it. _Good boy, don't be shy, that's right, you liked that, made a big mess didn't you..._

Her thumb brushed his cheek.

 _Shut up,_ he thought, closing his eyes as tightly as he could, tamping down the voice. _Shut up._

He would try. For her. For this one night. He would try, for the child she might conceive, if he was tender and generous enough…

Reluctantly, he let go of her.

She opened her hand around his cock, staring down between them. She traced a great blue vein that forked and spidered, from base to tip.

The meaty, swollen head of him, half-sheathed, wept into her palm, a steady trickle of pre-ejaculate, thin and clear. She squeezed him gently, working out more of his fluid. It dripped down her wrist, her forearm. He watched, his stomach in knots, his heart in his throat. He studied her face in the low light, scrutinized her expression for any trace of disgust, revulsion… but he found none.

She stroked him once, down his length, toward her belly. He felt his foreskin roll over the aching muscle of his cock, following her delicate grasp.

"Does that hurt?" she asked.

He shook his head, his mouth suddenly full and wet. She glanced up into his eyes, and then began to pump slowly, up and down the length of him. The both of them were spellbound by her ministrations, by the way his venous skin pulled back from his engorged, leaking head. His pre-come eased the glide of her fingers over his rigid flesh.

" _Oh_ ," escaped his lips. An anguished sound that seemed to inspire her. She moved nearer, so close that the tops of their thighs touched, so close that his cock, in her fist, curved up her naked stomach, leaving a sticky wet spot on her smooth, freckled skin. Almost imperceptibly, he thrust into her hand.

"Feels good?" She asked, and he felt her gaze on his mouth.

"Yes." He could barely nod, barely breathe. _Yes_ , he thought. _Yes, it feels amazing. Yes, like that. Yes, a thousand times, Claire._

She reached under his shaft with her other hand, gently taking his testicles in her palm, weighing them. He was heavy, he _knew_ he was heavy - in this heat, in this bed, in her hand. She rolled his turgid sack, feeling each swollen teste, lightly pinching and rubbing the thick, loose skin between her thumb and forefinger.

"Will you touch me?" she implored, her voice deep and throaty while her hands stroked and squeezed him.

"Are you sure?" He looked at her, searching her face for deception. But she held his gaze, held _him,_ unflinching. He groaned as she ran her thumb over the slit in the head of his cock, spreading a bead of pre-come.

"Yes," she said, and she let him go, easing back to take off her panties. He stared openly, hungrily, hypnotized by the sight of her stripping down for him. _For him_. She had removed all of her clothes. She had asked him to touch her. She was going to _accept_ him, all of him, inside of her. A gift, surely, of the highest order.

The blue panties slid over her thighs, slipped over her ankles. She abandoned them on the nightstand and then crawled back to him where he knelt, waiting for her, his cock harder than he'd thought possible. She took his hand in her own, bringing it to the sacred space between her thighs.

He flinched at the first touch of her, pulling away, the rough pads of his fingers suddenly wet with her. He looked up at her face to see if she'd taken offense, to see if an apology was in order. But she was only watching as he rubbed the curious slickness between his fingertips. She licked her lips, her own hand coming back to his tumescence. She massaged him, slowly rolling the loose foreskin up and down his cock.

Emboldened, he sought her cleft again. She took a deep breath and held it, arching towards him, her eyes nearly closed. She wasn't nearly as shy as him.

He cupped her mons first, and rubbed her gently with his palm, eliciting a moan. His middle finger burrowed between the small, silky folds, and stroked, never quite entering. She was incredibly wet. He lifted his finger from her soft, split lips, the both of them looking down, seeing the evidence of her arousal… of her fertility. A string of her nectar stretched between them.

He wanted to study her. To part her thighs wide and stare at the labia he knew were perfect, to hold her open and gaze inside of her, to learn by heart the narrow opening of her body. He put his finger back to her, dragged her moisture up to the tiny pearl at the very top of her pussy. Her clitoris was as delicate, as hidden as the rest of her. He touched her very softly at first, feeling her jerk against his hand, feeling her steady masturbation of him falter as she gave in to her own pleasure.

Circling the little nub with his wet fingertip, watching her eyes flutter closed, her brow furrow, he imagined bringing her to orgasm. Seeing her fall apart _because_ of what he was doing to her. Putting his mouth to hers as she came, and swallowing her cries.

"Inside," she whispered. "Feel inside me."

His cock bobbed at her words. The tip of his finger trailed down, parting her swollen lips again, seeking her tender hole. He found her and slipped inside, a fraction of an inch. That alone made her tighten around him. His heart pounded in his head. He began to thrust carefully - in and out, only to the first knuckle, a maddeningly slow sawing.

She let go of him, bracing herself on his shoulders as she let her knees spread farther, _farther_ , until she was spread wide, giving him access to every part of her. She rolled her hips, her eyes still closed as she seemed to concentrate on each sensation.

"More," she breathed.

He dipped into her, _reached_ inside of her, felt her walls close around him, felt her pulsate and take him… all the way to the tight ring of her cervix. He caressed her there, reverently, before languidly taking her with his finger.

She pressed her face to the crook of his neck, rocking against his hand. Her breath was hot on his skin, shuddering as she inhaled, nearly sighing as she exhaled. Her muscles clenched around his finger, soft and pink and wet, and he could feel the whole of her body tremble as he thumbed her clitoris again.

In a sudden burst of _something_ \- boldness, perhaps, or primal lust, or foolishness _-_ he pulled away from her. She twitched, hips following his hand as it withdrew. She raised her face from his shoulder, drawing back to look at him…and he guided her down towards the pillows.

 _Something different,_ he thought, as she moved with him. Her hair fanned around her. Her skin was flushed against the white sheets. Her lips were lovely in the near-dark, shining and swollen.

 _They had decided...to try something different…_

He looked into her eyes - cornflower, cloudless skies, the color of heavy summer - and his arms trembled as he anchored himself on either side of her. She was very still beneath him, and try as she might to hide it behind her unflinching mask, he saw the slightest hint of fear on her face. He heard the slightest spike in her pulse. He felt the slightest hitch to her breath.

 _Don't be afraid._ He wished he could say it. He wished it would fall from his lips as easily, as surely, as it did from hers. He wished it would sound like a promise, the way it had on her tongue. Not an empty, hollow phrase. A useless thing, a thing she could never hold, could never keep, could never _believe..._

Her thighs grazed his as she opened beneath him, slow and tentative.

He parted his lips. Closed them again. Shook above her as she bent her knees, angling herself towards him.

She reached up...reached for his face, but stopped, letting her hand drop to his shoulder, his quivering bicep. Her fingers curled around the muscle, squeezing with the barest pressure, like a kind of quiet reassurance.

He clenched his jaw tight, closing the space between them. The tip of his cock brushed the velvet of her sex. He reached down, grasping himself, pumping himself, so that his swollen head gently split her silky lips. He massaged her with his glans, gathered her wetness, pulling back just enough to spread her honey down his length with his trembling fingers.

At his brief retreat from her body, she slowly folded her leg over his. She locked herself to him, her thigh against his, her heel pressing into his calf…guiding him back to her most sensitive place.

He wouldn't make her wait.

He sucked in air through clenched teeth. She panted, tilting her hips, closing her eyes.

He pressed against her. Into her.

And like last time, she enveloped him, inch by blissful, torturous inch.

It was terrible. It was exquisite, unbearable _pleasure._ She was so much softer than he remembered. She was warm and cool and slick and tight, a tangle of everything. His thoughts stuttered and lurched, crashing together, piling atop one another.

She made a sound like a sigh. And she unfurled for him, little by little, as he settled inside her.

He was buried deep, throbbing with every pulse of her muscles around him. He was very close to her face, to her lips, which he watched with a kind of mesmerization - the way they parted and pouted with each of her shallow breaths, like she was struggling for words.

He wondered what she would taste like.

His chest, his stomach, his cock, his entire being _tightened_ at the thought. Scattered images flashed through his mind: his mouth on hers, on her jaw, on the pale column of her throat, on her shoulders and down, down further, where her full breasts threatened to brush his chest with each heaving breath, where her hips and her thighs sloped to the dark _v_ between her legs, where he was sheathed in pearl-smooth skin that seemed as if it were molded to him…

He jumped when her hands drifted to his back. His muscles strained with the effort of keeping himself over her, inside her, unmoving. They settled against his shoulder blades, her cool fingers splayed across his skin.

She urged him down. Urged him against her, flush with her body, skin to skin.

And like she had done before, his face found the soft curve of her neck, and he buried himself there. A place where his gaze couldn't linger on her. Where he wouldn't think of putting his mouth to her, biting her gently, tasting her skin. He hid himself, his _desire,_ with his eyes closed, inhaling the scent of her hair and her body.

And he began.

It was much the same as it was before - a steady pace, dragging out and sliding in. Slow, careful pulls and thrusts. His organ responding to hers, hardness to match her softness.

And it was _nothing_ like it was before. What had been a tense, grating incident felt strangely smooth and fluid now. She didn't press him down to the mattress, grinding frantically against him, teeth gritted, muscles rigid. Now, her body moved with his. She tilted her hips, and she butterflied her legs, and she spread herself wider for him, drew him in deeper with each languid thrust.

There were no words this time. No needling questions, no pointed barbs. There was nothing but the creaking of the bed and the soft sounds of their bodies.

Nothing but the fragile little noise she let out as he plunged back into her. A gasp. A cry. Something in the middle. She'd tried to stifle it - it was cut short at the end, muffled by his shoulder.

He raised his head, brow furrowing, and stopped, still buried inside her. She hadn't been particularly...delicate, the last time. The act didn't seem to hurt her. But perhaps he'd been too bold. Perhaps he'd moved too quickly. Perhaps he'd rubbed against something deep inside her that caused her to retreat…

He looked down, searching her face. Her eyes were closed, long lashes kissing the very crest of her cheek. Her lips - _her lips, her lips, always her lips_ \- were open and wet and full. Her throat was flushed and her chest was pink, and her face contorted in pleasure as he twitched inside her, and she fluttered around him.

She was...lovely.

Unbearably lovely, in the low lights, in the spill of shadows. His lungs seized as he watched her. If it weren't for her trembling muscles, and her breasts pressed flush to his chest, and her legs locked around his, anchoring him to her, he wouldn't have believed the sight of her beneath him.

"Deeper," she breathed, her eyes squeezed shut, her tongue darting across her lips.

It was no performance, this time. Her words were not carefully crafted to arouse him. Her fingers dug into him, and her back arched as he thrust into her again, _deeper,_ following her single command. She tossed her head to the side, baring her soft white neck. A trail of freckles swept across her shoulder...too many to count. He wanted to touch each and every one, to memorize the pattern of them, the way they scattered across her body…

Steadying himself above her, he reached out, touching her face. He guided her back towards him, and her eyes fluttered open, dazed and half-lidded as she looked up.

He leaned down, pressing his forehead to hers. Her mouth was _so close_ to his...painfully so. A hair's breadth away. Her breath brushed his face, slipped between his lips as he inhaled, filled his lungs and swirled out again. She bowed beneath him, wrapping herself tighter around him, urging him on with each roll of her hips, with each little gasp that shivered in the air between them.

One of her hands fell to her side, fisting the sheets, fingers clenching in the fabric. The other moved across his back, up his neck, stopping at his nape. She held him there, pressing him closer to her, holding his face near hers.

 _Imagine,_ he'd told her. _Trick your body._

He tried not to think of that now. He didn't want to know what she saw... _who_ she saw...as her eyes closed again. As she moaned quietly, and she yielded to the heat between them, every inch of her body reacting as he drove into her, and pulled back, and plunged still deeper towards her warm, wet center. Over and over again.

Her hand trailed back down his spine, settling against his waist. Her fingers dug into the skin there, holding tight.

He could feel himself getting very close. Slower than last time, and softer, perhaps - a gradual build from his core, growing stronger as her slick muscles clenched against him, as her gentle warmth pulled at him. She throbbed around him, and her breath came in quick, short pants, and she tilted her face up to him, her lips trembling just beneath his...near enough to claim her mouth, to kiss her breathless as she rocked with him, matching the steady rhythm of his hips, working him closer and closer to the edge…

"Are you going to come in me?" she whispered.

He inhaled sharply. " _Yes_ ," he said, and his voice was so desperate, so thin, not his own. She pressed her nose to his and her hand held the back of his head, feeling his sweat-soaked hair, pulling him deeper and deeper into her.

She was so close…her mouth was so close to his, nothing between them, nothing stopping them from...

She swallowed thickly, and he swore he could feel it as she bit her bottom lip. Her eyes were screwed shut so tightly, and her thighs were around his hips, squeezing, her heels trying to find purchase on him. "Tell me," she panted.

His heart thundered in his chest. "I'm going to come in you," he said, the breath of those strange words on her parted lips. The pressure in his cock, in his groin, in his throbbing, tightening sack, became unbearable.

"Tell me," she said again, one of her hands snaking up to brace herself on the headboard. She arched to meet his thrusts, urged him to fuck her harder. She twisted, spasmed under his weight, under his driving hips. She groaned and quivered so beautifully for him.

He watched, transfixed, wanting to remember her just like this - the way she moved in her heat, in her possession, in the trance that held them both. He was inescapably bewitched.

"I'm going to come in you…" His voice was deeper, stronger, coming from somewhere secret and rooted in him. He was lightheaded with it. "I'm going to fill you up."

She whimpered and her fingers tightened in his hair. Her hips yawned and rolled with his; their steady thrusting devolved to an instinctual, agonizing grind. He knew neither of them was in control now. Their slickened skin slipped, his open mouth nearly grazing hers, droplets of his sweat wetting her face. He pressed his cheek to hers and let her feel how his jaw clenched, how his teeth gnashed together…he let her feel what she'd driven him to. Under him, she writhed.

"No…" she moaned, plaintive and weak. But her body held him fast, her feet climbing up the his taut thighs, up to the dimples in his lower back, her hand tangled in his hair, pulling so hard it nearly hurt his scalp…he couldn't have stopped if he'd wanted to. "Please," she begged deliriously between her labored breaths. "Please…no…"

"I'm going to put my child in you, Claire," he growled, his lips against her ear. The wet, forbidden sounds of their bodies meeting, over and over, echoed around them in the sweltering, oppressive air. "You make me so hard...I have so much come for you," he murmured, feeling her shiver uncontrollably in his embrace. She bore down so that he could barely move to thrust into her. "Open up for me…let me make you pregnant—"

His breath caught on the last word.

Four, full aching pulses. He pumped into her once more, struggling for air, for relief.

"I feel you…I can feel you coming," she sobbed, her hands slipping across his wet back.

The horrible, wonderful pressure finally released. His body tensed, bending over her, around her, wracked with tremors. He twitched inside her, his face still pressed to hers, buried in the wild river of hair that swept across her pillow.

 _It was done._

He wanted, more than anything, to stay exactly where he was. He wanted to revel in the way every inch of his skin touched hers, the way their heaving breaths were nearly synchronized. He wanted to reach down between her legs, and try, _try_ to bring her some fraction of the bliss she'd given him, and watch her truly lose herself, hear her cry out for him in the dark…

He took a gulping, shivering breath. He tensed his arms, ready to push away from her.

"Wait," she whispered, her mouth brushing his ear. "Just...just a second…"

At her request, he stayed in her, on top of her, his weight on his tired arms so he didn't crush her beneath him. They breathed together, listened to each other in the near-dark. She held him, _clung_ to him, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. With his nose in her damp hair, he inhaled deeply, greedily, wanting to trap her very essence in his lungs.

 _How had this happened? How had any of this happened?_

"Claire…" He said her name against the creamy skin of her throat.

"Not yet," she said. She must have sensed him detaching, moving from her, growing soft inside of her. Her embrace of his body tightened. He heard desperation in her voice. Heard the spiderweb cracks in her words.

"Okay," he whispered. "Alright."

They held one another until she stopped crying.

* * *

The bathroom faucet squeaked as he turned it on. She heard water rushing into the sink. Heard it dripping from a rag as he wrung it out.

She sighed, shifting her hips on the pillow. Twenty minutes until she could stand up and shower…again. Or maybe fifteen now. She'd hadn't remembered to check the clock.

She felt sticky. Sweaty. Her hair was matted against the pillow. The sheets were damp beneath her, clinging to her skin.

It was...strange. Listening to him clean himself up in the other room. She could still feel him - she was swollen and tightly strung, muscles slowly unwinding in the aftermath of what they'd done.

She wondered, briefly, if he had felt her crying. If he knew. But she couldn't let herself linger on the thought too long...or else she might be reduced to burning, humiliating tears again.

She frowned, raising a hand to her stomach. She'd let herself get swept away _._ Just like he wanted, she was sure. And for a few moments, lost with him, she'd let herself forget the black, bitter truth at the core of things.

They were all here for him to use.

One after the other. A box of tissues.

So he'd been gentle with her...twice, now. So he'd made her body feel things it hadn't felt in years. So he'd whispered exactly what she wanted to hear in her ear, and she'd felt like his hands were undoing all that was tangled and hurting inside of her, knot by knot.

He was still Albert Wesker. The world had still ended in screams and blood and scorching flames...at the hands of monsters like him.

Hands that had been on her.

Hands that she'd _invited_ to touch her.

She stared at the bathroom door, thinking of Jill. The way she sat quietly by the waves, empty and pale as a ghost. The same girl who used to be strong and sure and steady.

A person who'd never really been _friendly,_ never been _warm,_ but had a nice smile, and had sharp eyes, and had a laugh that was more breath than voice. Who hovered in the corners of rooms and plucked out snippets of songs on the piano between drinks.

A person who'd had a funeral under bright, sunny skies. Who'd died. Disappeared. Come back to something that wasn't quite life. Wasn't quite herself.

He'd _destroyed_ that Jill Valentine.

And even though Claire knew it...she'd seen it, they'd all seen it...she'd spent the last hour with him. Writhing and whimpering for him.

He was still Albert Wesker. His hands had been soft, but he could still tear a person to shreds.

He emerged from the bathroom with a wet green washcloth. She stared at him over her elevated hips, her bony knees. He stopped to turn off the low track lights. The room was dark for a moment before her vision adjusted. She saw his eyes first - glowing like warm amber.

"Be careful that you don't -" he started, as he approached the side of the bed.

"I know. I won't touch your come, don't worry." She took the washcloth from him and gingerly wiped her mons, her thighs. She glanced up; he was watching… _closely_. "Do you mind?" she asked.

He smiled, turning away. "Right. Apologies."

She sighed and peered between her legs, running the cool wet cloth over the very sides of her puffy labia. "What if it doesn't take?"

He was silent for a moment. "The child, you mean?"

"Yeah." She rolled her eyes. "The _child_."

"I don't see why it wouldn't." He sounded thoughtful. "I suppose we should reevaluate our progress in two weeks time."

"Great," she answered flatly. "I'll pencil you in." She dropped the washcloth to the floor.

"Is something terribly wrong _again_ , Claire?" He picked up the used hand towel, walked it to her laundry basket. "You're markedly different than you were…about three minutes ago."

There was an edge to his voice. She recognized it immediately - a mocking, almost snide tone.

She settled back against the pillows. She glared, biting down on the side of her tongue.

 _He'd destroyed Jill Valentine. There was no reason he wouldn't try destroy her, too._

"I just hope that you were…as kind to Jill, as you were to me. Tonight." Her words trembled.

He turned to her then, squinting. "Jill? What does Jill have to do with…any of this?"

"Because I can't stop thinking about what you did to her." She swallowed. "It makes me fucking sick."

He glared at her. "She _told_ you about that?"

"Christ, she didn't have to." She sneered, her lip curling away from her teeth. "Look at her."

"I'm not sure where this... _attack_ is coming from." He crossed his arms, his expression settling back into _condescension_. His words were clipped to fine points. "But I assure you, whatever I _did_ with her is completely irrelevant now."

" _Irrelevant?_ Are you insane?" She gripped the sheet, twisting towards him. " _Look at her!_ You can see it in her fucking eyes! The shit you did to her...it's...it's fucking sick! I don't know what the hell you'd get out of -"

"I saved her life!" he yelled, his serene facade shattering.

Claire flinched, sinking back against the pillows. He rounded on her - a flicker of the thing he used to be, eyes flaring angry in the dark.

" _I_ saved her life." He thumped his chest, once, stepping towards the bed as she shifted away. He spoke through clenched teeth. " _I_ did. After your goddamned brother led her to me, and then left her behind to die…"

She _raged_ at the mention of Chris. "At least he didn't _rape_ her!"

Wesker's face dropped. He stopped, mid-step, hand falling limply to his side. "Rape?"

"I guess it's easy to forget that part, yeah? Between all the viruses and the mind control shit?" She turned her face away, jaw grinding, trying to ignore the dull ache between her legs. "Details get a little fuzzy when you've got that much going on."

He was quiet; she could hear him breathing.

"I am many things, Miss Redfield," he said, low and steady, struggling to control his words. "But I am not a rapist."

"Right. Yeah. Why don't we—"

"December 21st, 1997."

She paused. "What?"

"You're so _curious_ about my dalliances with Jill Valentine. December 21st, 1997. The first, and only time I…engaged with her."

She stared at him, her eyes narrow and dark.

"It was the evening of the company Christmas party. There was no coercion, no alcohol involved - although your beloved brother was very much drunk, per usual." He took a deep breath and began reciting the events coldly, as if reading from a log. "We had sex in her bed. It was snowing that night. I stayed with her, afterwards, if my memory serves me. And as far as I know… she honored our little secret for nearly twelve years."

Claire licked her bottom lip, chewed at it. She hesitated. "You didn't…you didn't rape her? When she was…"

"That was the last time I…shared _anything_ of myself, with anyone. Until you." He bent down to pick up his boxers. She watched as he stepped into them - right leg, left leg. "Think what you want, though. It makes no difference to me."

She suddenly felt very naked. The villa was stiflingly small and cavernously empty all at once. He seemed very far away as he bent to gather his clothes.

She studied him, the moonlight and shadows on his muscled shoulders. He turned his profile to her, his hair shining like silver, falling over his eyes. It was so long - she'd never noticed, never thought about it, never considered what it might look like without polish and lacquer. Long, bone-straight, and very white. She felt as if she was seeing it for the first time.

She hated herself for it.

"I'm…" She swallowed, watching as he fastened his shorts, his eyes locked firmly on his hands. "I didn't mean…"

"Of course not." His voice was dismissive, terse. "You never mean it, do you, Claire?" He worked his arms through his shirt, pulling it over his head, smoothing the fabric down.

She started to sit up, pushing herself onto her elbows.

"I don't believe it's time for you to move yet." There was no more edge to his words. No venom. Just a kind of dull resignation. He stared beyond her as he spoke, out the darkened windows. He seemed vacant, tightening the threads he'd loosened only moments ago.

She'd hurt him.

She'd actually _hurt_ him.

She stared at him, grasping for something to say. Everything slipped through her fingers, tumbling to the floor.

He glanced around the room, as if he were checking for anything he'd forgotten. His shoulders rose and fell with a heavy breath. "We'll assess things in two weeks. Sleep well."

He crossed her villa in quick, long strides.

He opened her door and stepped out into the humid night air, before shutting it softly behind him.

And in spite of everything...in spite of all the care and the softness and the gentle touches, in spite of their bodies fitting so beautifully into each other, in spite of their resolve to try _something different..._ she was back to where she was a month ago, on a horrible morning.

Hips on a pillow. Breath high and tight in her chest. A lump in her throat as she stared up at the gauzy canopy.

And like it did before, twenty minutes lasted twenty lifetimes.


	6. Lords and Serfs

**Chapter Six: Lords and Serfs**

" _I wept not, so to stone within I grew."  
Dante Alighieri_

Something had changed.

He could smell it in the air.

He smelled it in the late afternoon, under the wild red sun. Everyone was gathered on the main deck near the villas, divvying up the tasks that would keep them busy until dinner. There were shellfish to clean, stores to inventory, food to can and laundry to wash and brush piles to move. Endless work.

He hadn't imagined - foolishly - that the New World would have been so back-breaking. So _dull._

Claire stood in front of him, attention on Chris as he rattled through the afternoon's list. She'd showered, after another day spent toiling in the soon-to-be garden. She fidgeted impatiently, the sun beating down on her, her hair still shining damp beneath it.

Chris sighed, looking down at the list in his hand. "Somebody's gotta go through the dry stuff...see if anything else has those bugs in it. Leon? Claire?"

"Sure," Leon answered. And Claire nodded.

She turned, ready to follow him up towards the kitchen. And there was no warm breeze, nothing soft to carry the scent towards him...but he caught it.

It was hidden beneath the apple, and the ginger, and the blossoming trees, and the thousand other little smells that tangled together around her.

Something new. Something... _deep._ A different, distinct layer to her.

"Don't throw the other stuff out!" Rebecca called after them. "We can still eat it!"

"Oh my _god."_ Sherry pulled a face. "I'm not eating _insects._ That's the line. That's it."

"They're just protein…"

He frowned, eyes locked on the splintering wood beneath him, trying to focus past their banter. She smelled... _richer._ Fuller. It faded as she walked away, carried off towards the sea and the forest and the distant resort.

But it was there. He held it in his lungs, in his mouth, all honeyed and amber and unsettlingly _warm._

Unsettlingly familiar.

 _Part of him._ He set his jaw tighter. _Part of him and part of her._

The pregnancy had taken.

He looked up. She had turned to Leon. She was saying something. She tugged at one leg of her shorts, adjusting the hem against her thigh as she followed the path towards the kitchens.

He watched her, and his mouth felt very dry.

It was a success. His great _scheme._ The only reason he was here. The only reason any of them were here.

After months of struggle, of choices that weighed on him like lead, his bones bending beneath them...after months spent wiping away the ash and dust of what he'd built, trying to find something whole in the wreckage...after months of weaning himself off the serum, changing and softening and _weakening,_ feeling the virus coil and writhe in his blood as his increasingly _human_ body warred with it...

...it was finally a success.

And all he could feel, as she disappeared around the bend, was the hollow, needle-sharp question: _what now?_

"Somebody also needs to go check the nets," Chris was saying, restlessly shifting his weight from one leg to the other. "Volunteers?"

Jill halfheartedly raised her hand. Wesker nodded once, absently. Anything to get away from the group.

To get away and be alone and _think._

Because he had known the answer to _what now._ He had known _what now_ months ago, when Chris had begged for all their sorry lives.

He had known _what now_ on the ship, when he'd walked between the cryogenic chambers, monitoring the fluttering pulses and shallow breaths of the bodies inside them.

He had known _what now_ when she'd mounted him on his bed, her face set with a steely sort of determination, both of them resigned and reluctant.

He had known it with a cutting kind of clarity. He had known it like the steady pull of a compass.

He had known it until he'd been on top of her, inside of her again, their lips inches away from one another. Until he'd felt her frail, desperate breath in his mouth.

After that...it was as if he'd forgotten everything.

"Okay." Chris patted the pockets of his shorts, as though he were checking for something, the way he might have before work in the Old World. "Let's meet back at dinner."

The others murmured in agreement, spreading out, scattering in the direction of their various assignments. Jill looked at him - icy and hollow-eyed - and waited for him to move.

He took a deep breath, all rasping salty air, and started down the pier. Down towards the little spit of shore where the fishing nets were anchored.

 _The pregnancy had taken._ He told himself again and again, as he walked, Jill trailing like a silent specter behind him. _It had taken._

His grand, sweeping vision may have crumbled in the dry brush of Africa, but this had not. Claire Redfield was carrying his child. She would carry it for the next nine months. He would see her grow and see her change, all from a safe distance...away from the strange, primal spell she cast over his body...and this was only the first step, the first of many, and she was only a pawn on the chessboard that seemed to sprawl endlessly before him...

He curled his fingers to a fist, nails biting into the heel of his hand.

He _knew_ success. He knew the rush and burn of it when it first blossomed. He knew it when it faded to a dull simmer beneath his skin. He knew how tasted, how it felt, what it weighed in his palm.

This was nothing like it.

* * *

 _ **May 11, 2009**_

The coffee tasted stale.

He sipped it quietly, sitting in the ship's cabin. All around him, metal groaned and settled, battered by churning waves.

Seven days without Jill.

Putting her to sleep had been the right choice. The _only_ choice. She'd grown weak. She'd grown frail. She'd shriveled up before his eyes, pale and parched, a withered vine in the too-hot sun

But still, he...missed her.

He took another sip of the coffee, grimacing. He thought of the creamer in the kitchen - dry and dusty, with a sour taste.

Everything tasted wrong.

Everything felt wrong.

Everything _was_ wrong.

 _Years of planning._ He stared down at the tepid brown liquid. _Years of work._

The dismantling of Umbrella. The calculated H.C.F strikes. The acquisition of asset after asset...pandering to black market brokers, chipping away at Tricell's pristine facade, leaving a trail of ash and blood behind him.

He'd done more than _sell his soul._ He'd torn his soul to shreds. He'd unraveled himself. He'd cut himself to the bone, fighting for...

...this.

For one hundred and twenty-three of the infected. For a handful of reluctant survivors. For an empty, sprawling ocean in a desolate world.

For a black cat that peered at him from the armchair in the corner.

He'd failed.

That was the plain, stark truth of it. That was the word that tasted as bitter as the coffee, and clung to his lips, to his tongue, to every inch of him, black and slick.

 _Perhaps something could be salvaged._ The sharp, sure voice, the one that had worked to build all of this, grasped at threads. _The plan...the bargain with Redfield, the survivors slumbering below...it was all still in motion..._

He ran his fingertip around the rim of the mug.

 _Rebuild,_ the voice told him. _Rebuild and reclaim and rise._

But a part of him - a small, flickering thing, just a whisper - wanted to _rest._

He envied the others. Their peaceful oblivion. Over the past seven days, the world had taken its final shaking, struggling gasp. And he had been, perhaps, the only witness.

He tapped his finger against the side of the ceramic cup.

He leaned back in the chair, listening to it creak beneath him.

And he felt the weight of all this _emptiness_ pressing in around him, smothering him like a heavy, damp rag.

All this… _loneliness._

He hated the word. The feeling. Weak and useless and utterly, disgustingly _human._

Pathetic.

From the corner of his eye, he saw a blur of movement. The cat's tail disappeared through the cracked door, out into the hallway.

He sighed, shaking out of his self-pity. He pushed away from the desk, and strode across the room, wrenching the door open.

The hall was empty. He took a breath, ready to call the animal back…

 _He didn't know its damned name._ He glowered at the dark metal walls, the flickering lights, the sloping, spreading shadows beckoning further down the ship's interior.

"...cat?" he tried. His voice echoed off the steel.

Nothing moved.

He leaned against the frame, cool metal pressed against his temple. It had been a mistake, bringing it with them. It was too clever for its own good. But it had stared at him, with those great golden eyes, as he'd hoisted its master up none too gently, her head rolling back on her shoulders, her wild mess of hair clinging to anything and everything...as Jill had sworn under breath from the other room, and something had fallen to the floor with a loud clatter...as he'd looked around the little apartment one last time, scanning for anything they might have missed…

 _Fine,_ he'd told it, watching it flick its tail expectantly.

Now he squinted down the long corridor, searching for any sign of life.

Its name would be something... _insipid._ Something more humiliating than the poor creature deserved. _Inky_ or _Jinx_ or _Whiskers._

He couldn't bring himself to try any of them.

He stepped out into the hall. The air was eerily still.

He'd go to the kitchens and dig out the last of the salmon roe. It seemed particularly fond of that. It was excessive, yes, but he felt sorry for the little beast - all alone on the wide, dark ocean, at the end of the world. Nothing familiar or comforting around it.

No home. No family. No name.

He walked slowly, turning corner after dim, shadowed corner, and tried not to wonder if it felt the same about him.

* * *

Jill gripped the rope, tugging with all of her might.

He watched from the corner of his eye. She had been strong once...not long ago. She'd been sculpted to near-perfection beneath the exacting hammer and chisel of the P30. At times, she'd been nearly as fast and sleek and sure as him.

Now she took a deep breath, frowning - one of the few times he saw her features change - and tightened her hold on the rope, struggling to pull the damp netting closer to the shore.

"Let me," he said, dropping his own length of rope in the sand. She glared out over the blue-grey water, her eyes steely and focused. She shook her head.

He sighed, watching as she pulled again. The setting sun bore down on them both, and he ran his tongue along his bottom lip, tasting sweat. "Jill…"

"No," she said. It was a coarse, cracking word. Her shoulders rolled as she tugged at the rope, dragging the net inch by inch. Her muscles flexed and rippled, and the scars on her chest showed clearly in the early evening light, the skin there straining with each movement.

They were...healing well. As well as could be expected. She'd always have that angry red ring - it would always be just above her heart, as if she'd been branded.

Years from now, she would still see those faint marks, and remember the cold metal, the needles digging into her thin skin and quivering muscles, the weight of the shining red scarab resting against her breastbone.

Years from now, she would still know he'd put them there.

He stared at her. At her dark gold hair and her waxen skin. At the heavy circles beneath her eyes. A thousand things had changed since December 21st, 1997. She'd been so _sure_ of herself that evening, wearing simple black pants and a pale blue sweater. She'd leaned against the wall beside him, swirling an olive through her martini. She'd tucked a short strand of chestnut hair behind her ear as she looked out over the party, shaking her head at some off-color comment Chris had made.

 _I hate these things,_ she'd told him, with a little ghost of a smile in the corner of her lips. A teasing, flirting thing. She'd bitten one Spanish olive off a toothpick, and handed him the one that was left.

It had been a rare thing, to want to touch someone else, to want to feel himself _inside_ of them - even then, before the infection. And so he played along and followed her home.

She'd been vibrant. Full of life and breath and _fight._ And now...everything he touched...everything he had ever touched...it all ended up broken, bruised, blackened beyond recognition...

Now, she clenched her teeth as he watched her struggle. The surf broke, and the breeze rustled the scrubby brush, and her breath came in short, labored huffs.

"This is ridiculous," he muttered, watching the net bobbing uselessly in the shallows. He walked towards her, arm outstretched. "Move-"

His own breath caught as a sharp, sudden pain tore through him. It surged through his chest, his muscles seizing, ripping the air from his lungs.

He stumbled in the damp sand as it radiated out, and up, and down, burning along the length of his spine, throbbing in his temples. The world faded grey and dim, shrinking to the point of a pin.

 _Not now._

 _Not now. Not again. Not here._

He curled his hand to a fist, fighting the urge to double over. He inhaled sharply through his nose, desperately pushing back the rising wave of nausea that accompanied these... _fits._

It would pass. If he stayed very still, and kept breathing, and focused - just focused - it would pass...it always passed...

Through the haze of pain and sickness, he felt Jill's eyes on him. Piercing, icy blue.

He took a great, gulping breath, trying to find his voice and tell her it was nothing. To get back to work. He raised his arm, trying to wave her off. The movement sent him pitching forward, and he sank to one knee, panting as another spasm wrenched through him.

She was a shadow in the corner of his eye as she walked forward. She stopped beside him - didn't kneel, didn't reach out. Just stood, watching, and waiting.

The episodes had come on slowly at first. Quick, aching twinges in his joints. Tremors in his muscles. A vague unsettledness in his stomach, or the slightest edge of a fever creeping over him in the middle of the night.

He'd known the cessation of the serum would have unpleasant side effects, as the virus adapted to its newer - and far weaker - environment. He'd anticipated all the old symptoms - increased sensitivity, bone-deep exhaustion, unexplained pains. Things he kept to himself, in the dim lights of his own villa, as he tossed beneath the sheets late into the night, or stood in the shower with scalding water rushing over his shoulders.

They had come on slowly, but they were growing more and more frequent.

And they were growing stronger.

He could hear Jill breathing. He could hear it as loudly as if he were in the midst of a hurricane, wind roaring around him. Air swirled through her lungs, and the blur of the sea crashed against the shoreline, and each grain of sand scratched together like metal carving through a pane of glass.

He bit down hard, jaw grinding, swallowing the noise that rose in his throat as he pushed himself up off the ground. The sun was nearly gone, but the air still felt boiling hot, and left him reeling, gasping for breath.

He staggered a little as he stood upright. The world wavered, colors and shapes shifting, sharp noises growing and fading - and then it snapped into clarity all at once, fog lifting all around him. He blinked, flexing his hands. His fingers felt numb and bloodless.

He exhaled shakily. He raised a hand to his temple, still pounding dully. His fingertips came away damp with sweat.

And all the while, Jill watched. She was as distant and detached as she'd been when he first awakened her. Mute, with her face as blank as a mask.

"It's nothing," he said, answering the question she hadn't asked. His mouth felt dry and his tongue felt heavy. He stared at the coil of rope he'd dropped in the sand. "Leave this...for now. The others are waiting."

She tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ear. "You'll die soon if you don't take it," she said, hard and even.

"Shut up," he growled.

"No one will care." She stared at him. "No one will notice."

 _No one will notice._ A fate worse than death.

"Unless you mutate," she said, her voice as monotonous as his.

"Shut up!" The force of his own words sent him nearly to blacking out again. He stumbled before collapsing to hands and knees.

He stayed there, his fingers sifting through beautiful white sand. He pressed his face to the beach, felt the grains digging into his skin, felt them move with his breath. He closed his eyes.

"Get up."

He licked his lips, sand on his tongue.

"Get up, Wesker."

He had said the same thing to her once. Years ago. A lifetime ago. He gritted his teeth and pushed himself to kneeling. His head lolled back and the dying sun washed over him.

"Is this…what it is to be human?" he asked, out into the air. To her…to the sky…perhaps to god. To anything that would know the answer.

She came to stand in front of him. He looked up into her impassive face. She reached out and brushed his forehead, brushed his eyebrows, where the fine grains of sand clung to him. He could only close his eyes and let her.

"I'd rather be dead than this."

"You will be soon," she repeated. "Take the serum."

"I can't. It's not finished…I'm not finished," he whispered.

"Then die." Her answer was quiet, and it faded quickly as she turned to walk back towards the resort.

* * *

 _ **May 11, 2009**_

He found the cat on the bridge.

The windows looked out over the moonlit sea. The sky was black, bleeding into the dark water. All around him, monitors flickered and gauges pulsed, as the ship held steady on its course towards the shadowy horizon.

The cat had wedged itself beneath one of the counters, curled into a corner. It blinked up at him when he entered the room.

He sighed, pulling out one of the chairs, sinking into it. He worked the top off the little jar of salmon roe. As the seal popped free, the cat lifted its head, watching expectantly.

"Here." He scooped a spoonful of the bright, glistening eggs onto a little white saucer, setting it down beside the chair.

The cat padded forward cautiously, examining the plate.

"Go on," he urged, tipping his chin towards the roe. "You've had it before. You like it."

The cat sniffed at the little orange orbs, taking a delicate bite. And then another.

"Enjoy." Wesker leaned back, arms crossed over his chest. He turned the chair towards the windows, and stared into the black night with unfocused eyes. "We might as well treat ourselves while we're out here, don't you think?"

The cat, of course, failed to answer.

 _The cat. The cat, the cat._ The little beast desperately needed a name. It was the only living thing on the ship that could stand to be around him. And now, with Jill gone, with miles of rolling waves between the ship and their destination, with no one else for company…it might be the only thing to keep him from going mad with loneliness.

His eyes drifted towards the VHF radio mounted beside him. It had sat useless and silent for weeks. The screen had glowed an unwavering shade of orange, as bright as hot embers.

Not even a flicker of life from it.

He reached for the transmitter. He held it up to his mouth, taking a breath, then frowning.

He knew how to hail properly. How to keep the conversation short and direct. How to give orders, ask questions, keep his words cut tight and efficient.

But as he sat on the dark bridge, floating on the dead empty sea, miles away from the dead empty land, listening to the saucer scrape against the floor as the cat licked the edges…

"Are you there?" he asked.

It was all he could think to ask.

His own voice echoed hollowly around him. Static buzzed and hummed…and he waited.

He leaned back, the transmitter still gripped tightly in his hand, closing his eyes. _It had been weeks,_ he reminded himself. _Weeks, and he hadn't heard anything. He should have kept on top of her. He should have tracked her down when he had the chance. She would have come with them. She wasn't foolish...she was a thousand grating, terrible things, more than a simple thorn in his side, but never foolish...she would have come...and now…_

"You're lucky." His eyes flew open at the words, and he lurched towards the receiver, reaching for the volume, twisting the dial as far as it would go. "I usually don't answer when a man waits this long to call me."

Her voice was low - a bit rougher than usual, spiking and crackling with the feedback from the radio. But thicker, too. Gravelly. She sounded exhausted.

She sounded like she was on the verge of tears.

He'd never known Ada Wong to crack before.

He leaned forward, both elbows on the desk. He swallowed heavily, the transmitter hovering near his lips. It had only been seven days since he'd heard a voice besides his own, but sitting here now, the week seemed to stretch endlessly behind him.

"How are you?" he finally asked. He sounded unusually hoarse himself. "Where are you?"

"Can't complain." The receiver clicked and popped, swallowing her words. "-stopping outside Bangkok."

"Are you safe?"

She was silent. She was silent for so long that he worried the channel might have gone dead. That he'd been given a few moments of relief from the gnawing silence, only to be thrust back into it again...

"I'm not dead yet," she said at last. A half-answer. Empty and wilted.

He looked out into the night. Little droplets of saltwater on the glass obscured the horizon. "Can you hold out a bit longer?"

"I'll try," she said through the static. "I'll try."

* * *

The evening was heavy with noise. Bugs hummed and chirped and buzzed. Waves roared as a storm roiled on the horizon.

While the world around them was full of life and sound, the group was bitterly silent. Nothing but cutlery clattering and chairs creaking as they ate.

Wesker picked a pulpy seed from a blush-pink chunk of fruit. As unusually tense as they all seemed, the quietness was a blessing. The pounding of his heart had faded an hour ago, leaving an excruciating headache in its wake. He felt sore. He felt stiff.

He felt utterly - _pathetically_ \- exhausted.

Across from him, Moira flicked a discarded shrimp tail to the edge of her plate, sighing heavily. "Is there anything else to eat?"

Barry glanced down the table. "There's more-"

"Besides fucking _fish,"_ she snapped over him, eyes narrowing into a glare.

"Moira…" The man's voice was low. He rubbed his palm across his tired face, shoulders slumping in anticipation of yet another argument.

Just down from their bickering, Sherry tapped the blade of her dinner knife against the edge of her plate in a staccato rhythm. She rested her elbow on the table, chin cradled in her palm. Josh cleared his throat, asking someone to pass the pitcher of water. Leon plucked a thin fishbone from his mouth.

The wet heat of the day hadn't worn off, even as the sky grew dark and purple. The humidity was relentless, the very air they breathed seeming to suffocate them. Wesker's shirt clung to his back. It had been uncomfortably damp as soon as he'd pulled it on before dinner, and his body regulated itself better than any of theirs. He knew they were all sweating and miserable.

Chris stared out over the group from his seat at the head of the table. His thick fingers played with the tines of a fork, his heavily-muscled forearm flexed under the low light. Moths fluttered around chandelier at the very top of the gazebo; Wesker could hear their soft bodies whispering against the double-pane glass.

"I have something I wanna say," Chris said, his voice low. He twisted the metal cap off another bottle of _Vonu_. "To everyone."

Wesker rubbed his nose, counting the collection of bottles around the illustrious, hulking leader they'd elected.

Chris downed the beer in about three gulps.

 _Oh, how they'd elected such a terrible mistake._ Kennedy would have been better suited to the task - second to himself, of course. But who was he to convince them. He'd watch them let Chris run the community into the ground and then he'd calmly take over. They'd be incredibly grateful; he'd be incredibly humble. Things would fall into their natural order in time.

Chris reclined, his steely gaze drifting down the gathered, tired faces. His eyes, strangely resolute for the amount of alcohol in his system, settled on Wesker, at the other end of the long, formal table.

Wesker sighed.

"I know you all blame me," Chris started. "For all this. I get it. I fuckin' get it."

"Don't," Claire warned. "You're drunk. We're exhausted."

"And you're right. There was monster," he continued, his upper lip curling. "I should have killed a long time ago."

Wesker rolled his eyes. _Such a flare for the dramatic._ He had never realized...never imagined...that Redfield could be so theatrical.

"But he grew…and he grew…until it looked like he was too big to kill."

Wesker tilted his head, the corners of his mouth tugging and resisting a smile.

"When he finally took everything from me…beat me half to death…had me on my fucking knees…" Chris put two fingers to his temple, his hand the shape of a gun. "He said, _I am a merciful god_."

Sheva stood up, the feet of her chair stuttering across the floor, and she stormed away from the gazebo and the moths and the memory. The rest of them stared at their empty plates, and their still feet, and their useless hands - some flat on the table, some balled into fists.

"He told me to make a list. Of the people I love. I had to choose…slavery…or death. And I chose life."

"Chris, not tonight," Claire warned again.

"No one knows… _none_ of you know...what the fuck it's like. To have to make that choice." Chris ignored his sister. "He said, _I am such a benevolent god that_ -"

" _I will save your people because you cannot_ ," Wesker finished. They stared at each other. Wind whipped the gauzy curtains and night birds called in the forest. "Which I did. You're all very much alive, because of me."

"But your big scheme failed." Chris grinned bitterly.

"Is there a point you'd like to make here?" Wesker asked, waving his hand dismissively.

"Oh yeah…there's a point." Chris glared. "You're not a god… you're barely even a monster now, huh?"

Wesker held his gaze, unblinking. "Is that…some sort of threat?"

Chris smiled and Wesker felt them all looking at him, their eyes boring into him, through him, where he sat. "It might be."

Wesker laughed under his breath. "I have the strength of twenty of you." He looked from face to face. "On my _worst_ day."

"Why the fuck should any of us listen to you anymore, you piece of shit?" Chris bellowed, rushing to his feet. "You lost!"

Wesker didn't rise. "Because I will take my ship…and leave you all here to rot on Pleasure Island. Would you like that? Would that make you feel better? Tell me, _Chris_ … what happens when you run out of beer?"

Chris sneered at him. "I swear to god, you fuckin'-"

"Do you know anything about feudalism?" Claire asked loudly, interrupting them. Wesker's narrowed eyes darted to her.

He had been taking great pains to ignore her entirely. As _entirely_ as he could manage, when she was as bright and sharp as the goddamned sun at noon. When her voice was loud and her words were cutting. When her scent had changed to something whole and full, something that called to him like a flaring beacon.

"Oh please, Miss Redfield. Educate me." He sat back in his chair.

She ignored the bite in his words. "At the top, there's the lord, right?"

Wesker's knee bounced, out of sight, under the table. His brow furrowed.

"And under him… there's a bunch of serfs." She pushed her plate away, the half-eaten fish seeming to suddenly disgust her. She draped her napkin over the pile of pale flesh and silvery skin. "We're the serfs, aren't we?"

He took a deep breath. "If you were the _serfs_ ," he mocked, "and I was the lord, in this metaphor...what about it?"

"The serfs belonged to the land and worked it. Without them, the lord would starve."

"You're forgetting, Claire, in your little analogy, that without the lord's protection, the serfs would be overrun by barbarians," he said in the most belittling tone he could manage. He fought to keep from wincing at his own words.

"Pretty much," she agreed. She kept her face neutral, holding his gaze.

"Well. What a mind for strategy you have, Miss Redfield," he laughed. "I'm surrounded by geniuses. I simply cannot spit without hitting a-"

"We need each other, Wesker."

He stared at her, silenced. His thoughts raced with biting retorts, vehement denials, vicious insults. He didn't need _them_ , these idiots, these freeloaders…but the way she had said it, the conviction in her voice, the deep blue fire in her eyes...

It was as if she was speaking only to him. It was a confession. It was a white flag.

It was an apology.

"You need our bodies. All of them. And we'll need yours…when those monsters come here." She looked at her friends, looked at her brother. "And they will come here. It's just a matter of time."

* * *

She crawled into bed at nine.

After another hellish day in the sun, she was spent. Exhausted in a way she had never been. Every muscle was tight with pain, and she could still feel the cruel heat and glaring light on her face. It was like standing too close to a fire.

She sank into the cool pillow, the cool sheets, her body relaxing muscle by muscle. As inviting as the bed was, a new torture awaited her here - _aloneness._

It crept up on her every time she stopped to catch her breath. Every time she was still for a moment. Every second spent away from the daily toil was an opportunity for her mind to race and whir.

He'd hardly looked in her direction since that night. And when he did, it was ice cold, untouchably distant. He'd sneered at her. He'd mocked her.

How could he be so near and so far at the same time? How could he work side by side with her, and not feel a thing, say a thing? His face, his body, his manner were all a perfect mask of indifference.

She hadn't expected him to change, really. She hadn't expected him to be kind or grateful or _warm_ to her, after the way they'd ended things that night, no...

Or had she?

How could she be so stupid?

 _But how could he turn everything off?_

She buried her face in her pillow. She'd lost herself with him in these fine Egyptian linens before. Now they felt like sandpaper against her sunburnt skin.

She'd thought she was strong. She'd _told_ herself she was strong. And lying in the bed now, with her muscles aching and her skin throbbing and some unknown thing gouging and bleeding her...she realized she had no idea what being _strong_ would entail here. What this little island at the end of the world would ask of her.

She wasn't strong. She knew that now.

 _He's a monster. His affection was a mirage…and you're an idiot._

She inhaled deeply, dragged whatever was left of him on the sheets into her tired lungs. The lowest notes of his cologne were left behind. Soon, those too would disappear into the wet sea air.

 _He takes back everything he gives. Destroys everything he touches. It's his nature - you can't fault a snake for having fangs, can you?_

She turned her face to look out the great glass doors that opened up onto her deck. A warm southerly breeze billowed the pale gauzy curtains in and out of her villa; the mosquito net around her lonely bed swayed. On the pier, a torch burned dim and low, and in the resort rotunda, white table cloths fluttered like ghosts on the gusts of hot tropical wind. Nights on the island were dark, but the velvety-black sky was always scattered with brilliant glittering stars, and layers of feathered gray clouds that drifted across the heavy moon.

She sighed and pulled her ponytail loose, her cold, damp hair soothing her painful shoulders. She stared at the rubber band around her wrist and frowned, snapping it hard enough to make it sting.

 _Wake up_ , she told herself. _Wake up and knock this shit off._

She would have to be _strong_ tomorrow. That stupid, meaningless word again. Tomorrow, she would take the parts of herself that had softened, and hide them away while she licked her wounds. She would find the pieces of her shell that had shattered like crystal beneath his hands, and rebuild it, bit by bit.

She would calcify herself against these strange, desperate feelings. And she would tell herself, again and again, that she only felt them because they were _here_ , at the end of it all, together.

There was endless research on the relationships forged by battle and difficult work. She'd been through it herself, with Steve, with Leon. Bonds like these felt deep, but were built on a foundation of mutual fear, of sheer survival. And here...once the camp was stable, once there was a real plan, once they lived year to year instead of day to day…she would look back at this time, and feel nothing.

She would be numb again.

She would be safe.

The sound of something wet hitting her deck made her jump. Before she realized what she was doing, she'd yanked her beretta from the sideboard. The bright red dot of her sight was aimed squarely on a dark figure, pulling itself up from the bay onto the swim-out of her private pool.

She held her breath, her chest on fire, her heart thundering against her ribs.

Slowly, she clicked the safety off and pulled back the hammer. She licked her lips.

The figure stood in the frame of her French doors, the curtains winding and unwinding around him in the starlight. She saw that it was a man.

A man had come out of the sea and into her room. Not a monster.

Fiery-bright eyes in a shadowed face betrayed his identity. Her heart, the wretched, pitiful traitor that it was, skipped and stammered.

The ocean dripped off him and sounded like rain on her deck…sounded like rain in her villa, as he stepped over the threshold. The moon, milky and full, shone in the trail of watery footprints he left behind. He came closer, without being invited, without waiting for her permission. She could _see_ him then, she could see his face…

He looked so alive and afraid and _awake._

She nudged the mosquito net open with the gun barrel and then laid the weapon down quietly on her side table. She sat up in her bed and stared at him, her brow furrowed.

"What…what are you doing?" She looked past him, out towards the pool, the ocean. "Did you... _swim_ here?"

He didn't reply. He glanced back over his shoulder, at the water, at the pier, at the other villas, and then he looked at her again - the same startled expression, as if he couldn't believe he was there, as if he had no idea of how he came to be there at all.

 _Something was wrong._ He would never… he wouldn't show up here. He wouldn't come to her after days of silence, unless something had happened. Maybe someone was hurt - maybe it was Jill, or Sherry, or…

Chris. He had been so drunk.

 _Oh God…not Chris. Please God, not him._

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, pushed the canopy open and stood up, shaking and naked, save for a pair of her brother's boxers. Wesker took a breath so deep she could hear it.

"What's wrong? What happened?" she asked, her voice trembling. "Why are you...what are you doing here?"

He blinked, his eyes more luminous than she had ever seen them - even in his rage. "Did you…" he started, and stopped almost immediately, struggling with the words, his voice barely a whisper. "Did you imagine someone else, when I was inside you?"

Her poor heart dropped, landing somewhere deep and heavy in her stomach. And then…the familiar, unwelcome sensation of tears, gathering just behind her wide eyes, threatening to fall. Her nose stung. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She panted.

 _Don't cry. Why are you crying? Don't you dare…don't you dare show him...don't let him crack you!_

But it was too late.

She felt a tear trail down her hot cheek. She was pathetic. She was _pathetic_ and she hadn't thought of Leon when Wesker had been inside her. She hadn't thought of anyone but _him._

Her answer slipped out so softly, so suddenly, that she thought she may have imagined it. "No."

He was on her in two strides, in the span of time it took for a single sob to escape her throat. His hands found her face, held her still as his mouth claimed hers. He was kissing her. He was kissing her willingly, _hungrily_ , his lips parting hers, his fingers guiding her up towards his mouth. He was leading her. He bent over her in the dark, her back bowing with him, and her body melting into his. He was cool and wet on her burning, tender skin. She cried into him - shocked, and ashamed, and completely hopeless.

Her fingers brushed his wrist, and closed around his forearm, holding his hand in place against her cheek. He kissed her _hard_ \- achingly hard, and deep, his tongue on her lips, his tongue against hers. He kissed her like he was starving. And so was she. Her hand drifted to the back of his neck, pulling him down, pulling him closer. He tasted like the ocean - briny, dark, mysterious - and she drank him in, drowned in him, swept out by the roaring current of their touch.

He broke away with a shuddering breath, and his lips trailed down her jaw, down her throat to the soft curve of her bare shoulder, licking and sucking and nipping so gently that she could only shiver, and gasp.

He was going to devour her alive. And she was going to let him.

She tangled her fingers in his thick, wet hair and pulled his head back so that she could look at him.

He gazed down at her, panting, shoulders heaving. His hand cupped her cheek, his thumb brushing the swell of her bottom lip. He seemed almost… ethereal as they stood there, both breathless, both shocked.

"Do you need me, Claire?" he whispered, so close she could feel his words in her mouth.

She could only nod - mutely, absently, while his nose brushed against hers, and his breath mingled with hers, and he lowered his lips back to hers, his fingers twining in her hair.

 _We need each other, Wesker._

* * *

 _[A/N: Thanks to all of our very patient readers! This has slowed down a bit as we work on another project, but it's always on our minds, so expect an update in the not-too-distant future. If you want to hop over to AO3, we're gradually updating each chapter with moodboards and songs. Feel free to check it out and let us know what you think! And as always, thank you for taking the time to read and review!]_


	7. Canto

" _Do not be afraid; our fate_

 _Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift"_

 _-Dante Alighieri_

* * *

 _February, 1996._

"Lookit the littlest Redfield," Chuck Turner said, when she was within earshot. "Already a pro."

Claire polished off her fourth shitty beer with a gulp and glowered at Chris's idiot friend. They'd known Chuck since she was five; he'd lived in the house down the street with his ex-con dad and his questionable stepmom, who wore orange platform mules, even in the snow. Chuck was always gleefully co-signing Chris's stupidest ideas.

She hated him.

It hadn't stopped her from making out with him once, in the backyard, but that was something she'd done her best to forget.

She moved to toss the can in the trash, but it was already overflowing, bottles and paper plates and red cups spilling onto the linoleum floor. She sighed, leaving the can on the counter. The air in their little house was barely breathable - smoke hung like a thick gray blanket, below the drop ceiling, seeming to vibrate to the bass of _California Love_. There was some unidentifiable stain on the living room carpet, and there were at least forty people in the fucking house - the fucking house that was 1,242 claustrophobic square feet. And it was only 7:30 at night.

"Don't talk to my little sister," Chris barked from across the kitchen. "Don't talk to her, don't think about her, don't even look at her." He held the top on their mother's cracked blender as he mixed something nearly fluorescent blue, pausing the motor to take a drag of his cigarette, which he kept balanced on the edge of the sink. A girl in a tight black tank top leaned dangerously close to him, offering to taste whatever poison he was making. She looked up at him, saccharine and cloying, sucking the blue drink off her finger. She coughed.

"What the fuck is in that?" She choked, shaking her head. "Paint thinner?"

"It'll get me drunk, sweetheart… all that matters…" Chris laughed around his cigarette, waving the girl in the tank top away from the blender.

Claire rolled her eyes and turned from the scene. It was like this every time he and that cunt Dawn broke up. Party after party, Chris passing out trashed, waking up trashed. Until she called him. And then he and Dawn would make up, loudly, passionately, sometimes violently.

Claire gave it another month before they started the cycle all over again.

Someone bumped her, and brown liquor sloshed out of their cup, splattering to the kitchen floor as they mumbled a slurred _sorry._ The girl in the tank top was laughing shrilly, probably touching Chris's arm. There was a muffled crash from the living room. The plain beige lamp turned over, family photos knocked off the shelf...it didn't fucking matter.

She sighed, shouldering her way out of the kitchen and towards the stairs. She needed to try and stay out of the fray, if only for a little while. It would give her time to decide where she'd sleep. The evening's _festivities_ were just ramping up - and like a fever, Chris's alcohol-induced depression-euphoria would only get worse before it got better. She'd probably need to head over to Mandy's for the night, and crash on the couch. Or maybe she could—

She stopped, suddenly bolted in place at the foot of the stairs. She swallowed...hard. Three boys from Sandusky High School, _her_ high school, were sitting on the steps at the top of the landing, right outside her door, talking and laughing, pantomiming some poor bastard in their story. She knew them, of course; they were football players on the varsity team: DJ Heinz, Anthony Hubbard, and Zachary Brian Larson.

DJ and Anthony were well-liked juniors, in her class. Zachary was a senior though - Ohio University-bound, handsome, heavily muscled, almost a man.

Her breath caught in her throat. She considered walking away, but that would have been bizarre, she was almost there already, and they'd seen her - surely, they'd seen her. So she looked down and began to trek up the longest flight of stairs of her life.

Her heart stuttered in horror when the boys' animated conversation stopped, but she stared at the worn carpet and squared her shoulders. _This was her house_ , she reminded herself forcefully. _Hers. And these… extremely… popular… athletes… were her guests… there, in her house, at her pleasure, and—_

"Aren't you Claire Redfield?"

Her terrified eyes darted up. She licked her lips. Zachary. Zachary Brian Larson has just spoken to _her_. And he knew her name. _He knew her name._

"Yeah," she said, barely a whisper. She didn't know if he'd heard her over the music downstairs. _Black Hole Sun_ blared from tinny speakers somewhere below.

"Chris is your brother, right?" he asked, standing. He stepped aside for her, nudging the other two boys so that they too stood up and out of her way. "He's a fuckin' legend, like, Coach still plays his tapes for us, to get us hyped. Chris Redfield, number twenty-five, right?"

"Yeah… that's him… my brother," she replied. The Legendary Chris Redfield. _Who forwent two full-ride scholarships out of fear that everyone would figure out he could barely read…_

"He was a fuckin' genius on the field," DJ added.

"Dude," Anthony agreed, reverently.

She narrowed her eyes at them, speechless. _Genius_ and _Chris_ were mutually exclusive concepts.

"Hey," Zachary said. "Go get me a drink. Get one for Claire too. Quick."

"I'm really… it's fi—" she started, but the other two boys were already taking the stairs two at a time for their quarterback.

She was alone then. With Zachary Brian Larson, right in front of her bedroom door.

"This is a decent party," he said after a strange beat.

She ran her hand nervously over her hair, tucking it behind her ear. She wondered how her eyeliner looked then - _was is smudged, crooked? God, let it be at least even..._ "Yeah. He's uh… he's good at having parties."

"I can't believe we've never talked at school," Zachary said, leaning against the wall, half-shadowed.

Claire shrugged and picked at her chipped nail polish. "I don't think we share any friends."

"We should," he said.

She looked up, into his dark eyes. She could only hold his gaze for a moment before she returned to studying his feet.

"You shy?" he asked.

"No," she said, fighting an awkward smile.

"No?" he replied with his own confident grin. "We could talk now, since we never talked at school."

Her eyes flitted up to his. "Get to know each other?"

"Yeah. Get to know each other."

She took a deep breath. She always took a deep breath before _it_ happened. "Get to know each other in my room, you mean?"

For a moment, he looked surprised at her boldness. She found they were always surprised, actually, and maybe a little relieved. Claire Redfield had figured most men out by the time she was 17.

"Sure," Zachary Brian Larson said.

They always said _sure_.

* * *

 _April, 1996._

"Miss Redfield?"

The doctor had knocked before coming in. She was a genial and slight young woman, probably just out of med school. She held a clipboard and pen in one hand, and extended the other to Claire after crossing the examination room in a few forceful strides. "I'm Doctor Rau. It's a pleasure to meet you."

Claire shook it, nodding. It was only the third or fourth time anyone in her life had formally shaken her hand. "Hi," she said, her voice barely a whisper.

"Well, you don't sound too happy to be here," the doctor laughed. A nurse stepped into the room, careful to keep the door from opening too wide. She smiled at Claire - a quick and close-lipped smile, and then she was digging through a drawer. Claire watched the nurse as she produced several tools, tugging open their sterile plastic pouches, lining up the startling silver instruments on a gauze-covered tray. Claire's heart thumped wildly in her chest.

"So, what brings you here today? Your annual check up?" The doctor paged through the papers on the clipboard.

"I've never had an… annual exam, actually," Claire said, clearing her throat. "But um… I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant."

"Okay. And you took a test? At home?"

"Yeah." Claire looked up at the doctor, brushing her bangs out of her face. Her hands came to rest fitfully in her lap, the paper gown crinkling every time she moved or breathed.

"You've missed a period?"

"Yeah."

"When was your last period supposed to start?"

"March 16th. I think." She waited then… for a look of disappointment. A look of disgust. Perhaps shock - she was young, after all, and Zachary Brian Larson hadn't even been her boyfriend, she reasoned.

But the doctor just scribbled something on the clipboard and then turned her attention back to Claire. She took a deep breath and _smiled_.

"We'll check it out for you, to confirm." She sat down on a rolling stool and hugged the clipboard to her chest. "If you are pregnant, you've got a lot of options, Claire. Okay? We can —"

"I want an abortion." The words fell from her lips without hesitation. She only paused to swallow. Her mouth felt very dry. "My brother is selling the house to send me to college next summer, and my parents are dead, and there's no one to… um… like, if I kept a baby, there would be no one to help me, and—". She gasped for air, suddenly unable to finish the sentence, or even the thought.

Claire braced herself, tears building behind her eyes. Her vision swam under the hard fluorescent lights. She picked her nails so loudly she was sure both of the other women heard it.

Doctor Rau studied her for a moment. She reached out, touching Claire's hands, stilling them. "Yeah. We can do that. It's your decision."

Claire's shoulders sagged with relief.

* * *

 _May, 1996._

"So it didn't even hurt?" Julie Blankenship asked. She was staring at herself in the girls' bathroom mirror, her mouth opened in the shape of a great _O_. She ran a nude lipstick over her lips twice, careful to not smudge the much darker liner.

Julie has been Claire's best friend since the 7th grade. They'd hit every adolescent milestone together, even losing their virginities on the same night, at the same party, a little over a year ago. Julie's mom had helped teach Claire to drive, and Julie's family had taken Chris and her in on holidays, when the pain of their parents' deaths was most unbearable.

She hadn't told Julie about Zachary Brian Larson, though. She hadn't told anyone.

"It was a couple of pills, dumbass. I told you that like five times." Claire adjusted her wrist corsage and shook her head. She could see the tight, hard curls of her prom-styled hair in her peripheral vision - it was driving her crazy. "I hate this shit. I don't even know why I'm here," she sighed.

"Me either." Julie rolled her eyes. She covered her teeth again with her lips and applied a heavy gloss.

"Jesus. Is that your blow job face?" Claire asked, smiling wickedly. "No wonder Andy's avoiding you."

" _You_ should learn to give blow jobs," Julie replied, trying not to laugh as she layered more gloss.

"My mom did it once," Nicole Bowers added, tugging at the low neckline of her dress, examining her profile in the mirror. "Terminated, or whatever. But with the vacuum thing they use, right? I found out when my aunt got drunk at Christmas dinner and pulled me aside to _warn me_ about boys."

"Traumatic," Claire winced.

"For real," Nicole agreed, crossing her arms. "Did you like… feel bad?"

Claire looked at her friends' reflections. "Of course," she said quietly. "Like really bad… but sort of relieved." She cracked her knuckles. "I just never wanna do it again."

"Oh, Claire." Nicole met her gaze in the mirror, her frosted eyes enormous and sad. "I wish you woulda called me or something… I coulda gone with you, or at least —"

"It's fine. I'm fine now," she assured her.

"My girl Claire is a hard-ass bitch, Nicole, okay?" Julie said, pointing wildly. "She can handle it, alright? Save your tears for when one of us gets called up on that stage, yeah? Fucking prom queen."

"Oh, you're _definitely…_ gonna get prom queen, Jules," Claire agreed, nodding facetiously. "They love losers like you." Nicole laughed, grabbing Claire's hand, kissing her bare shoulder.

Around them, the bathroom echoed with the conversations of teenage girls. Dresses swished past, make-up clattered to the cheap tile floor, toilets flushed intermittently.

Every time the door was opened, a wave of too-loud music washed over the entire lavatory.

Julie hummed along to _Tha Crossroads_ , wetting her fingertips and smoothing them over the wispy hairs that had escaped her own lacquered curls. "So are you ever gonna tell us who knocked you up, Wreckfield?"

"Absolutely not," Claire smiled.

A junior no one recognized threw open the swinging door. "They're announcing!" She yelled.

"Oh my _gawd_ ," Julie moaned, leaning dramatically on the countertop, fanning herself. "It's my moment, girls."

The three of them laughed and looped their arms around each other, heading out to the gymnasium floor.

* * *

When the principal called Zachary Brian Larson up to be crowned the prom king, he'd looked directly into Claire's eyes, smiling widely, as he weaved through the students of Sandusky High School, like a warrior returning victorious.

It had been two months since he'd slept with her. Two months since he'd rolled out of her messy bed at three in the morning and kissed her goodbye. She hadn't asked for his number, or made small conversation about something inconsequential to keep him with her longer. Instead, she imagined, maybe, that he'd show up at their little house one night, to see her again. Or that he'd find out her locker number and leave her a note.

He hadn't done any of those things. In fact, he'd never spoken to her again.

She'd told herself that was fine - preferable, even. She was a woman who didn't _need_ that kind of attention from a guy after they'd hooked up. _Hooking up was the goal, wasn't it? This wasn't the 1950s_ , she'd told herself late at night, the cordless phone silent beside her.

And so she'd passed him in the halls as he finished out his few classes, seen him standing outside in the late afternoon sun, heard him laughing with his always-present group of friends...and she didn't even glance at him.

Everything seemed to slow to a crawl around her - the confetti falling from the high gym ceiling, the spotlights roaming over the crowd, the warped music of that year's graduating class song. She clapped along with everyone else, and it felt like she was moving underwater.

The school cheered when he kissed Cindy Kuvulcek under the streamers, in front of the cardboard scenery.

Cindy Kuvulcek. Pink dress. Blonde hair. Prom queen. And Zachary's girlfriend since his sophomore year.

As she stood there watching Cindy - thinking about the girl's acceptance into Brown, and her cardiologist father, and her stay-at-home mother, and her big white house in a neighborhood with a gate and manicured lawns - she felt the stupid, childish part of her bubble up the surface. The naive little girl that she hadn't killed yet, even though she'd tried her hardest.

She had hoped...she'd actually hoped...that Zachary Brian Larson's toothpaste-ad smile might be for her. Even just a tiny bit of it. _Hers._

But it wasn't. It never had been. It never would be.

She clapped harder and whooped with Julie, mocking the ridiculousness of the prom, of the night, of _life,_ until she grew hoarse. And she decided, palms stinging, light-headed from yelling and laughing, that she would get _really, really drunk_ after all of this. She wanted to get as drunk as Chris…and stay that way. Forever.

Because she wasn't _Cindy fucking Kuvulcek._ She was Claire Redfield.

She was Claire Redfield, and her parents had died. Their bodies had lain bloody and mangled on the quiet road, dusted with snow, until paramedics arrived and pronounced both of them DOA. Her brother had been dishonorably discharged from the Airforce for gross insubordination - insubordination that resulted from his Sergeant grabbing his crotch in the locker room. They were broke, and the house was falling apart, and Chris was gonna sell it just to send her to Cincinnati, just so she'd have half a chance at a decent life. And here she was, in Julie's older sister's dress, after she'd gotten an _abortion._

But in spite of all that…deep down, under all the dust and the dirt and the shit life had piled on her...she'd still believed in fairytales. She'd believed in romance and magic and fate, in _meant to be_ and _happily ever after._ She'd believed it would all work out somehow, it would all mean something one day...up until she'd seen Zachary Brian Larson on prom night.

And the fairytale unraveled.

 _Stupid._

 _Stupid, stupid girl._

 _No one's coming to save you._

* * *

"Am I still fertile?" Claire asked slowly. She felt him shift next to her in the bed.

"No," Wesker said.

She kept staring at the canopy. Her hands itched and burned with the uncertainty of what to do, what to touch. She gripped the sheet and hoped he wouldn't notice. The insides of her thighs were wet.

"Then what did we just do?" Her voice was small.

She heard him inhale deeply.

"Were you..." His words were stilted and cautious in the silence of her villa. "Have I misread… cues-"

Her nostrils flared. Her jaw ached from clenching. Still, she stared at the gauzy mosquito net above them. "No," she said, ashamed. She felt him exhale.

"It was consensual?"

"Yes."

He waited a moment before speaking again. "Do you want me to leave?"

"Do _you_ want to leave?" Her reply was quick, terse.

She knew he was staring at her, in the shadows and pale moonlight. He was trying very hard to understand her, she would give him that. But she wasn't sure yet if she _wanted_ to be understood by him.

He pushed himself up. The box springs groaned beneath him. He sat on the edge of her bed and ran his hands through his sea-damp hair. She dared to look then.

The muscles of his back stretched and surged as he moved. He was broad, across the shoulders - as broad as Chris, and they were nearly the same height. But Wesker carried his weight differently than her brother; he was lean and cruel, where Chris was stocky and amiable.

Wesker's body, his face… was like a Renaissance painting come to life. He was the bad angel, cast out, scowling up at the heavens. She realized then… she wanted to watch him forever. Just watch him, and measure his movements, memorize his features, devour him with her eyes.

The bad angel reached down and picked up his wet boxers.

"Don't." The word escaped her lips before she could stop it.

He was very still. "Don't what?" he asked.

She couldn't. She could not. The words refused to come out. She would _not_ ask Albert Wesker to stay in her bed. She wouldn't.

He sighed, the boxers balled in his fist. He turned to her then, his beautiful, sharp profile illuminated by the moon.

"You must be plain with me, Claire," he said, frustration rising in his hushed voice. "I don't know how to do _this_. I don't —"

"I want you to stay." It was hard. It was so very hard to tell him the truth.

He wouldn't. He wouldn't stay now, even if he did want to. It would make him too vulnerable. Too _human._ He would leave, and she would be able to calm herself, and recover, and see this for what it was...just an illusion. All of it. Just a mistake.

She felt her skin, so very tight and hot, throbbing with every beat of her heart.

"I would like to stay," he said. It rasped in the stillness, every word seeming to be fraught with something heavy and painful. It made her heart ache.

She felt weak and light-headed. She hated him. _God,_ she hated him. She hated how it was hard to breathe around him. She hated the sweat that chilled on her back whenever she saw him. She hated the way her stomach twisted and jumped at the sound of his steady, cold voice.

She hated that he had blocked out the sun, blocked out everything, so that he was all she thought about.

"I want to stay in your bed, Claire. Beside you."

She was dizzy when he eased back into the mattress, back under the sheet.

Back next to her.

He touched her slowly, hesitantly, his fingertips barely tracing the edge of her hairline. Across the swell of her cheekbone. Down her temple, brushing away a fine curl of damp hair.

Her breath caught in her lungs. Her heart lurched, beating wildly against her ribs.

She lifted her hand - shaking, sweat-slick - from the sheet, fingers closing around his wrist. Wordlessly, she guided his touch lower, towards the throb of her pulse… towards the fragile column of her throat.

 _Make me feel it. Make me feel something. Make me afraid again._

She inhaled. She closed her eyes, pressing his fingers into her skin. Deeper and deeper, until she felt the first flicker of pain bloom beneath them.

When she let go, and she gave him the power to hurt her...when she let herself trip and fall into whatever lay ahead...he stopped. His hand pulled away from the too-hot flesh of her throat, but she could feel the prints of his fingers there, burned into her like a brand. She nearly cried out with the frustration of it.

 _Do it,_ she wanted to beg. _Do it. It's what you want. It's what they always want._

And still, he studied her as they shared her pillow and the moonlight spilled impossibly blue over his features. He watched her, his offending hand hidden from her sight, agonizingly _not_ touching her.

She pulled him to her body, her thigh draping over his naked hip, squeezing and possessing. Her cleft, still wet with his release, seemed to kiss his hipbone. She felt him inhale sharply, and she almost smiled. He needed reminding. She could force him this way - drive him to cruel, feral lust. She was sure of it.

But he only threaded his fingers in her wild, wet hair and pressed his forehead to hers.

His affection, real or imagined or contrived or rehearsed or true, whatever it was, felt as natural as anything ever had to her. She nearly believed him in that moment. She came so close to _something_ when he looked into her.

 _She hated him._

"Stop doing that," she hissed.

He pulled back, only an inch or two between their mouths, their noses, his breath hot on her lips. "Doing what?" he asked. His eyes glowed warmly, gently.

"Touching me like that." Her jaw tightened, her teeth grinding.

"I'm not-" he began.

"You touch me like I'm going to break."

His hand was on her cheek, barely resting there, and his thumb brushed the delicate skin just below her eye. Her nostrils flared as she tried to contain herself.

 _She hated him._

"Stop," she whispered. She struggled against him then, willful. "I can handle you, Wesker."

"Yes," he agreed. And then his thumb stroked her eyebrow, smoothing it so softly she almost didn't feel it. He searched her face, unblinking and serious, in the blue moonlight.

"I can handle what you are… you don't have to keep pretending," she panted. _A monster. A killer. Act like it. Act like what you are, you coward._

He stilled. He licked his lips and frowned. He looked into her eyes. "What am I?" he asked, guileless, honest… almost human again.

She swallowed. _Murderer. Bad angel._ But as the seconds ticked by… she found couldn't say it. She couldn't say it any more than she could admit what was happening to her heart. To call him a _monster_ was to declare herself its lover. Tears, embarrassing and weak, pricked the corners of her eyes. How many times had he reduced her to this? How many times would she let him?

Somehow, their lips met again. And again. Slowly now. Quivering and tentative. Mouths open and only the very tips of tongues feeling, searching, tasting. There was no sound but the tide below and their strange breathless gasps.

"Will you let me stay?" he asked.

 _She hated him, she hated him..._

" _Yes,_ " she nearly sobbed.

"Will you let me inside of you again?"

"Yes." She sucked his bottom lip. "Yes."

"Please," he whispered, his hips rolling against her.

"Yes," she said.

They writhed under the sheet like fallen angels until the next morning.


	8. Pilot Run

_What is it then? Why do you hesitate?_  
 _Why do you relish living like a coward?  
Why cannot you be bold and keen to start?_

 _\- Dante Alighieri_

* * *

It was as if he blinked… and he was there again.

 _There_.

In the mansion.

Lightning cracked, reverberating down the endless hall, electrifying the still air. Wesker felt the thunder roll beneath his feet, through the worn and tattered Turkish runner. The gothic arches seemed to groan with the power of the storm. Heavy rain lashed at the windows in punishing torrents, threatening to break the old glass panes.

A cry pierced the night - a woman's scream. He was rooted to the spot, staring dumbly down the rows of doors, just as he had so many times in his youth. He swallowed, his mouth horribly dry. Another shriek echoed out to him. It mingled with a long peal of thunder, and then a high-pitched howl of agony.

He knew, without truly knowing, that the woman's pain was emanating from the last room at the end of the hall.

 _Spencer's library._

His feet moved of their own volition, carrying him ever closer to the source of the horrible sounds.

 _No._

He fought his own body. He struggled to turn away, to run back… but still, he took step after carefully placed step, towards the horror of whatever lay ahead. One of the tall oak doors was cracked open, perhaps an inch, and the flashing white light of the storm blinked just beyond the threshold.

He watched his hand, thin and shaking, push the door. It was heavy and it creaked on its ancient hinges, swinging out a foot, and then a bit more, until there was just enough space for him to ease through, to step into Spencer's athenaeum.

Wesker narrowed his eyes at the grotesque scene.

The Old Man was hunched over the end of the long, dusty table, his gnarled back a mass of bony bumps and knobs under his brocade robe. In front of him, someone, or something, was laid out under a white sheet, splayed legs dangling lifelessly on either side of the wet wood top. The pale thighs rippled and trembled with each pull Spencer made. He hummed maniacally, a crazed and unnameable tune, and his narrow shoulders jumped as he worked, yanking and tearing, a tool glinting in his spotted hand. There was a hideous _ripping_ that seemed to split the quiet night itself. Wesker watched, his stomach lurching, as a deluge of dark blood and thick mucus splashed to the stone floor, pooling around Spencer's slippered feet.

"That you, boy?" He stopped his ministrations and turned so that Wesker could see his silhouetted profile in the flashing of the storm. "Couldn't stay away, could you?"

 _No._

"Well, don't dawdle! Come here!" The Old Man shouted.

Wesker stared at him. _Please don't make me._

But his legs...his traitorous legs...carried him to the table. He stood beside it then, his eyes fixed on the draped body, on the veiled face. _A strong nose, a full lower lip, a sharp jaw_...

"Take a peek, won't you?" Spencer gestured to the form in front of them, his crooked, palsied hands dripping with blood, brandishing a gleaming silver scalpel. Blooms and blemishes of awful red seeped through the pure white sheet like freckles on sunkissed skin. "It's your best work, after all," Spencer said, gleefully.

Wesker hesitated. His captive breath burned his lungs. Slowly, tentatively, he lifted the edge of the sheet, turning it down. Like an auburn crown, her wild hair framed her head and throat. Her vacant eyes stared up endlessly, bereft, blue glass beads in a slab of white marble. The bloodless skin of her face was nearly translucent, drawn unnaturally taut over her fine cheekbones, and her beautiful lips were parted in her final, silent scream.

He winced, gasping, heat rushing to his head. He stepped back, stumbled away. "No… no," he whispered. He gagged, bent at the waist, heaving up saliva and bile. "What did you do?" he pleaded, his voice broken and desperate. _"What have you done?"_

"What have _I_ done? What have _you_ done, you idiot," Spencer sneered at him, while he cradled something small and writhing in his bloody arms. "So much wasted potential."

Wesker looked up, his eyes wide and terrified. "What?"

"I always knew you couldn't do anything right, _boy_ ," Spencer said, holding out the shapeless, dark creature.

It cried then, the excruciating, wretched wails of a monster.

* * *

He sat straight up in the bed, the breath crushed from his poor lungs.

He blinked wildly, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, forcing himself completely, painfully awake. His gaze snapped to the figure under the sheet beside him. He yanked the covers away, tore them off, nearly stripping the bed in his anguish.

Claire seemed to choke - a small, horrified sound from the back of her throat, the only noise in the villa. She twisted around to face him then, shock and fear marring her features. She curled up into herself, covering her breasts and pressing her thighs together, trying to hide her body from the first purple-pink rays of the Pacific sunrise. "What are you-" she gasped between panicked breaths.

She was _alive_ , so very much alive.

He could only stare at her.

She lay, naked and panting for a moment before she tried again. "Wesker?"

He looked into her eyes. Startling, lively, cornflower blue.

 _It had been a dream. Just a nightmare._

"Hey," she said softly, pushing herself up, an arm still wrapped around her chest.

"I apologize," he said, finally exhaling. He turned away from her, shameful and dazed, and reached for the sheets he'd thrown off of them. He felt the mattress shift and glanced up when she offered him the glass of water she kept at her bedside. He took it from her and she pulled the duvet up over her breasts, tucking it beneath her arms, as she watched him warily.

He tried to raise the glass to his mouth… but his hand trembled and shook so that the rim rattled against his teeth.

The cup steadied. He opened his eyes. She was holding it for him, slowly tilting the glass to his lips. Grateful, he drank her water until his mouth wasn't dry, until his throat didn't ache, until the horror of his nightmare had paled and faded and the feeling of helplessness was just another memory.

She set the empty glass back down on her side table.

"We've got an hour," she told him, quietly, gently.

They laid down on their sides and watched each other, until she fell asleep again.

* * *

He squinted out towards the horizon, where the first rays of light had spread across the sky. The red sun crept up the over the water, illuminating the island.

 _It would be a long day,_ he thought, as the cries of circling gulls rose over the gray waves. He was... _tired,_ in a way he hardly recognized. The work from yesterday made his limbs feel heavy. The already-oppressive morning heat made his skin feel tight. The roiling virus made his blood feel thick and sluggish.

And the dream still gnawed at him from the corners of his mind.

It would be a long day for Claire as well. She'd spent the night playing his lover, spent the morning as his nurse, and she'd spend the rest of the day in the unforgiving sun, working and toiling and sweating, all the while, growing another being - human or monster or something in between. A splinter of guilt pained him.

 _Did she already feel it? Whatever it was that had taken root inside of her?_

She shook out her wild spill of hair, gathering it over one sun-pink shoulder. She turned away, and in the low morning light, her back was smooth and pale and dusted with freckles. Her waist dipped, and her hips flared, and a shadow settled in the soft dimple of her spine.

Her body would change soon. Stretching and swelling, accommodating the pregnancy.

 _Do you know?_ he thought, and nearly asked. _Do you know what I've done to you? What I've damned you to?_ The guilt stung like nettles as he watched her work her fingers through the tangled ends of her hair. He watched her speckled shoulders rise and fall with her breath, and he held his own. He watched the slanted light creeping, warm and rose-gold, across the twisted bedsheets, across his body, up the gentle curve of her side.

He had called her _lovely_ once. Sharp and mocking, relishing the way she grimaced at the word. Another island. Another place that felt as hollow as the world's end. Another plan, another grand _scheme,_ another human in his way. A girl to break and toss aside.

 _Lovely,_ he thought, as she stood, stretching again, the blades of her shoulders drawing closer together. It was true. She was lovely...radiant, glowing...and yet, he would ruin her all the same.

The scream from his nightmare seemed to echo through the villa. Beneath his skin, and through his bones.

She walked towards the bathroom, turning when she reached the doorway. She looked at him - tired and hazy and curious, brow furrowing slightly.

 _What now?_ she seemed to be asking. _What next?_

In just a short while, the gentle morning light would sharpen, and the sweltering day would settle in around them. The pier would echo with voices and footsteps. The strange, silent peace he felt here - in her villa, in her bed, watching her across the room - would melt away beneath the harsh blue sky.

And he would have to tell her.

 _Nothing now. Nothing next._

 _It's done._

 _You've conceived._

Simple words. Deceptively simple. He tested them behind closed lips, feeling them catch in his throat.

She stood, hesitating, as if she too could feel the words grating at him, feel his nervous, stuttering pulse pounding in his chest.

She stared at him, leaning with one shoulder against the wall.

Wrapped one arm around her torso, just below her breasts.

Ran her tongue across the dry skin of her lower lip.

"Claire," he said, very hoarse.

And she blinked, her tired eyes suddenly sharp and clear in the morning light. "Yeah."

The image from the nightmare flashed across his memory - her limp body, her cold white features, her sightless eyes. The sharp metal scent of her blood still filled his lungs.

A wave of _something_ coursed through his veins. It wove itself through his ribs, and twined around his heart, his lungs, spreading and cutting like a thorny vine. An aching, awful need to touch her. To hold her. To sink into her, and prove that she was _alive,_ that she was whole, that she was here.

That he had not killed her. Not yet.

The confession was heavy on his twitching lips. It hung in the air between them. It gathered in the droplets of sweat that formed on his throat.

But he couldn't say _it_.

 _Not yet. Not yet._ His heart and his body pleaded until he felt he would the words would strangle him if he dared speak them aloud.

"I'm gonna… get ready," she said, breaking through the fog of his thoughts.

He nodded once - slow, his muscles reluctant.

She licked her kiss-swollen lip again, and nodded back tentatively - and he was sure that neither of them knew what they meant to say. Her eyes lingered on him for one last moment. Shocking blue flickered up, down, finally away.

She stepped into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. His heartbeat echoed deep and hollow, three steady times. He felt his pulse down through the tips of his fingers. He stared down at his hands.

"You're pregnant," he whispered, when he was sure she wouldn't hear.

* * *

 _Early 1972._

It was simple. _Grab the slide. Pull it back. Pin out. Push the slide forward. Hold tight...stabilize the recoil spring…_

His hands trembled, and his fingers felt numb, and his palms were clammy. His lungs burned as he held his breath, guiding the pistol's slide off its frame.

 _Stabilize the recoil spring, the guide rod...slight compression…_

"Remember it's twenty-five seconds, boy." The voice came from over his shoulder. He didn't look up. "You've spent twelve of them fumbling."

 _Slight compression._ He clenched his jaw. The gun's frame was slick with sweat. _Slight compression...remove the spring assembly from the barrel lug…_

He had practiced all night. He'd sat at the little metal desk in his dormitory, assembling and disassembling the empty weapon again and again. He'd done it until his eyes stung. Until his knuckles were bruised from knocking against the metal, and his fingertips were scratched raw from pins and coils.

Alex had practiced, too.

 _Slowly decompress..._

Alex said her time was twenty-seven seconds.

 _Lift the spring assembly out of the slide..._

Alex did not have to worry about what would happen after the examination.

 _Recoil spring and guide rod. Recoil spring and guide rod. Recoil-_

Alex was the _favorite_.

"Five seconds left. Hurry it up."

The voice was closer. Close enough that he could feel breath hot on his ear. He jerked, and the pistol slipped from his hand, clattering to the table.

He stared down at the pieces of the gun. The stark white lights hummed above him, glinting off the polished metal barrel.

He felt five seconds pass like a scorpion crawling down his spine.

Spencer's stopwatch rang out the end of the trial.

It beeped four times, quick and high. Then four more. And four after that. An alarm Spencer didn't silence for what seemed to be an eternity.

And as it beeped, Albert tore his gaze from the gun, and looked, very slowly, at his hands.

Small. Inadequate. Barely - almost imperceptibly - shaking.

"Well," Spencer said, still standing very close. "Not exactly a success, was it?"

His left index finger twitched.

He'd never dropped it. Hours of practice. Hours. _He'd never dropped it._

"What went wrong?"

The question was very calm. Very flat. Spencer moved to stand beside him, and reached for the partially-disassembled gun.

 _What went wrong._ He stretched for the right answer. He wondered if there was one at all.

 _He was nervous._ Weakness. Vulnerability. A crack in the armor he has been taught to so carefully craft.

 _He was sloppy._ Failure in the face of pressure. A black smudge on a record which was to be absolutely pristine.

 _The pistol's weight was different, the tension in this model's spring assembly was unexpected, the slide snagged and cost him a quarter of a second…_

Every answer fell short.

He opened his mouth, taking a quick breath. He closed it again as Spencer pushed the pistol's slide back into place.

"Saw you were up quite late last night," Spencer said. "Watched the footage myself this morning. Just under three hundred trials. Impressive dedication."

He swallowed, unsure of what to say. His eyes stung from staring at the tabletop, and his mouth was very dry.

Spencer weighed the pistol in his hand. "Didn't manage to break twenty-six seconds on a single one, did you?"

 _Answer him._

 _He's waiting on an answer._

 _Say no, sir. I didn't, sir. I couldn't, sir._

Spencer's shoulders fell with a heavy sigh. He looked to Albert...and Albert turned, glancing up into the man's sharp, cold eyes, then quickly down to the tile floor.

"You're disappointed, boy?" Spencer asked.

Albert nodded. He swallowed, his throat tight.

"Good." Spencer's tone was flat. He carefully examined the pistol, wiping away a fingerprint on the barrel. "Look around you. Quiet room. Bright lights. Couldn't make it any easier for you if we tried."

 _He'd failed._ Though the other training exercises had not been particularly forgiving - the ugly yellow-brown bruise wrapping around his side served to remind him of that - he had not _failed_ them.

Excellent in marksmanship. Basic combat. Endurance. Cognitive processing. Mental acuity.

At age eleven, he could interpret deep sequencing data from viral genomes...but he could not disassemble a pistol.

Not with Oswell Spencer's eyes on him.

"Alright then." Spencer laid the pistol gently on the counter. "You know what's next, of course."

His pulse rushed. He heard the words as if they were very far away, drowned behind the echoing rush of blood in his ears. For every failure...too weak, too slow, too rough, too reckless...there would be a punishment.

There had always been a punishment.

Albert flinched as the man moved. It was almost a reflex, his muscles stiffening and twisting without thought, urging him to _go._ To run and hide and fight and defend...

Spencer let out a dry scratch of a laugh, looking down at Albert. At the way angled his narrow hips towards the table, his small hands hovering near the fly of his pants, covering himself.

The laugh made his stomach churn.

"Don't worry, boy." Spencer reached out, giving him a firm pat on the shoulder. "Not interested in what you've got there. Not today."

The room felt very cold as Spencer turned away, reaching for the counter behind them. Very cold, and very large, and very hollow. And Albert felt very...horribly, pitifully, insignificantly...small.

"Hands on the table," Spencer said. A drawer opened, and its contents rattled.

Without hesitation, Albert placed his hands flat on the cold surface. He stared straight ahead, at the wall, at the mirrored glass used for observations. At his reflection, distorted and unnatural.

"Twenty five seconds was the goal," Spencer said, turning back to him. "Ought to start with twenty five strokes then, I imagine."

There was no preamble. No time to draw in a tight breath and brace himself. The rod whipped through the air, striking the knuckles of his left hand, and then his right with quick, cruel precision.

He grunted and writhed as pain blossomed across his skin… but still, he kept his hands flat on the tabletop.

"Don't _flinch_ , boy. Be a man."

It was a dull sting at first, almost numbing. He heard the switch hissing, heard it crack against his joints. Three times. Four times. Five times.

On the sixth stroke, the skin split on his left hand, and the numbness gave way to a searing burn.

His wrist jerked reflexively. The switch stilled, and Spencer paused, examining the spots of bright red blood.

A part of him - naive, foolish, _hopeful_ \- imagined, for a moment, that Spencer might stop. He would tell Albert to fetch some gauze from the cabinet, and clean up, and go back to his room. That they would try again tomorrow.

He gasped sharply as the rod struck him again.

Twenty five strokes felt as impossible as twenty five seconds. He closed his eyes, terrible tears prickling beneath his lids. He had learned, long ago, that if he cried - if he failed to remain stoic and stolid - the punishment would only escalate.

He timed his breath to the pattern of the switch. Inhaling as it rose in its wicked arc. Exhaling as it bit into his flesh again and again.

Blood smeared the tops of both hands now. It dripped between his fingers. Angry red lines marked his skin, and he could feel his pulse throbbing deep in the fragile bones of his hand.

 _It hurt._ He closed his eyes still tighter, and bit the side of his tongue. _It hurt, but not the way he'd come to fear, it was only a switch, only a lifeless thing made of wood, only skin that would bruise and swell and mend, it was only a switch and it couldn't burrow deeper, it couldn't reach the dark secret spaces inside him, it couldn't take more and more and more…_

"Holding up better than usual," Spencer muttered. "Finally learning something, are we?"

Another stroke. Another jolt of pain that ripped the air from his lungs. His knees shook. He pressed his hands tighter to the table.

"You might earn yourself a reward." The words were punctuated with a sickening crack. Albert tasted copper on his tongue. His vision flashed bright white. "An opportunity, perhaps."

Spencer stopped, brandishing the switch towards the gun.

"One more stroke," he said. He tapped the rod against his open palm, and nodded to himself. "Then you ought to try again. Shame to let all that practice go to waste."

Albert took a shallow breath. It shuddered, and it burned in his lungs. He could only gasp, and nod, and focus on anything, _anything_ besides the excruciating pain in his hands, the raw skin, the twitching muscles, the sharp sting of heightened nerves-

"Twenty five seconds this time," Spencer said. "Wouldn't fail again, if I were you."

The switch came down for its twenty-fifth impact. It was so violent that Ozwell Spencer chipped Albert's third metacarpal bone.

* * *

Claire stood in the sweltering kitchen, hunched over a yellow legal pad on the stainless steel countertop. It was not even noon and the temperature on the island had already crept up into the _oppressive and debilitating_ range.

And it would only get worse.

A drop of sweat trailed from her hairline, down her nose, splashing the paper in front of her before she could stop its progress.

"Shit," she whispered, wiping it away and smudging the word _rice_. She sighed and rewrote it just underneath, adding _17 50 lb bags_. She imagined that the rice would last maybe six months for the group if they all ate a portion at one meal a day. And that was only if it didn't get wet, or infested, or rotted, she didn't know. _However fucking rice went bad_. There had already been talk of visiting the mainland after they'd evaluated their stores - for seeds, for perishables, for batteries, and soap, and clothes, and a million other things no one had planned for before The End of It All.

With the thought of tightly rationing food and the inherent danger of a mainland expedition and the miserable heat, she felt… utterly, completely exhausted.

She turned, biting the cap of the pen, squinting at the rows of metal shelving. She'd already catalogued the resort's canned goods, and she'd pushed through about half of the dry ingredients. There was still the walk-in freezer too, which had somehow stayed frozen with the help of the generators when the power grid had gone down, god knew when that was. She crossed her arms and stared dazedly at the task before her. Her iPod skipped to the next random track, the little speaker set to max volume distorted the song's opening notes.

She pulled a leatherman from her back pocket and tugged the knife arm out.

"With a kiss you can strip me defenseless… with a touch I completely lose _con_ -trol," she sang along softly as she sliced through the plastic wrap on a pallet of boxes. "'Til all that's left of my strength is a memory…". She plucked a red box out of the stack and examined it, tucking the leatherman back into her pocket. The text on the packaging was French, but the smiling pink shrimp was universal enough.

 _Bonito flakes,_ she decided, tossing the box down and scribbling it in with the rest of her notes.

"... get weak when I look at you… weak, when we touch… I can't speak when I look in your eyes," she belted out the chorus with Belinda Carlisle, smiling at how tone-deaf she was, her voice echoing around the sterile commercial kitchen.

She yanked the ponytail holder from her hair, her scalp and roots damp with sweat, still heavy with the scent of apple shampoo. She doubled over, head between her legs and the rubber band clenched in her teeth as she raked her hands through her hair, gathering it in a knot to keep it off the back of her neck. "... get weak, when you're next to me, weak with this love, I can't speak when I look —"

She gasped, and the hair tie dropped to the floor as she sprang up, backing away until she bumped against the shelving. Her heart was pounding against her ribs.

"Jesus _Christ_!" she ground out, her open palm slapping the metal. "How long have you been standing there?" Her voice cracked in exasperation.

"A moment… perhaps a few." He stood in the doorway, leaning on the frame, half-shadowed. The red _Exit_ light glowed dimly above him, matched by his eyes.

Glaring, she snatched up the ponytail holder and furiously pulled her hair out of her face. She tugged on the messy bun, her nostrils flaring, her heart still hammering away, infuriatingly. "Well fucking _stop_ ," she snapped.

"Surely… after… you don't believe I would —"

"Murder me?" she blurted out, a sort of laugh. She touched her chest, willing her racing pulse to slow. "What are you doing here?"

He looked at her, perhaps _through_ her, and seemed to seriously consider his next words. Taking a deep breath, he pushed away from the door jamb. He crossed his arms. "I wanted to… talk to you."

She straightened her shoulders, her hands suddenly anxious and bothersome. She wanted to touch him. But she didn't. "Yeah? No one assigned you a job today? Must be nice."

He opened his mouth, and then closed it. His clever tongue darted out to lick his lips, still so strangely pink from the night before. When he had kissed her, and she had kissed him back. For hours.

The image she'd caught in the villa's full-length mirror flooded her mind: her hands slipping over his sweat-slicked back, his face buried in the wet curve between her throat and shoulder, the quivering rise and fall of their bodies, and her thighs, parting ever wider, greedy to take him, to take _everything._

She had memorized their dance around the villa - the couch, the floor, her bed. A beginning, a middle, and an end. She'd urged him down onto the sofa, climbed onto his lap and straddled his hips in only a pair of boxers. She ground herself against his painful hardness, and all the while, their mouths belonged to each other. She pressed him into the cushions and he dripped saltwater on the fine fabric, wetting it, cooling them both when she was sure they'd caught fire.

On the floor, they'd crawled over the hardwood on aching hands and bruised knees, desperately trying to shrug out of what little clothing was left between them, like snakes shedding their skins, sliding and rubbing against one another in their fever. When he was finally, _mercifully_ free of his shorts, his hipbones pressed flush to her ass, she felt his cock twitch between her thighs, leaving her skin sticky with his need. He'd covered her body with his own, covered all of her from behind, the entire length of him bound to the entire length of her. Slowly, shakily, he hunched against her sex, parting her swollen wet lips but resisting entrance. Her eyes were half-lidded, unseeing, her mouth slack as she took deep and ragged breaths, as she felt his lips on the back of her neck, and then the side of her throat, and then the shell of her ear. His affection was wet and soft, no teeth, no hard edges. She heard the saliva in his mouth as it closed over her earlobe, suckling, the small sensitive hairs there sending electricity down her spine. His reverent hands found her heavy breasts, and he tenderly felt them, so gentle it almost hurt. She arched against him, used the head of his cock to stroke herself hungrily.

And finally the bed. Her vision went black at the edges on the first thrust, as he opened her up. Her muscles parted for him, made space for him, welcomed him. They had moved like one animal then, sharing a mind, driven by a single primal instinct. She clung to him, meeting every roll of his hips, until they were barely moving, until it was only the beating of their hearts and the heat of their breath, until he held her face still to claim her mouth again. And even as they kissed, they stared at each other - staggered and dumbfounded, so very bewildered and perhaps...

 _Fated._

She left the memory, pressing pause on the loop of scenes that had begun playing in her head the second she'd woken up. She turned her attention back to _him_ , to whatever he wanted to talk about so badly, to tell him to _spit it out_...but she only frowned at him. "Your...nose is...uh…"

His hand shot up to his face and he swiped at his upper lip with his fingertips; they came away wet with his blood. His jaw clenched and he looked… disappointed. A drop of blood trailed over his lips and seeped between them. He sighed, trying to rub it away, but only succeeding in turning his even white teeth a gory shade of pink. More drops followed, and then it became a steady trickle. He stared, forlorn, at the red streaks on his hands.

"Alright. That's _bad_ ," she said, after another moment of stillness passed. She turned, searching the kitchen for something... _anything_ to staunch the flow of his nosebleed. She lifted empty boxes and rifled through open drawers. She threw open the cabinets beneath the sink, knocking aside bottles of dish soap and packs of brass scouring pads. There wasn't a cloth, or a napkin, or a goddamn roll of paper towels anywhere. "What the fuck… what the _fuck_ ," she growled, slamming the cabinet door closed.

When she turned back to him, she saw him bent over, pinching the bridge of his nose, which was doing absolutely nothing to help. A red puddle had formed on the grated floor.

"Shit," she hissed, going to his side. Unflinching, she grabbed the back of her tank top and yanked it over her head, stripping down to her worn sports bra.

"What are you doing?" he demanded.

"You've gotta stop that bleeding, Wesker." She balled the shirt in her hands, and reached out to—

He grabbed her wrist so fast she hadn't seen him move at all. He squeezed, hard enough to make her yelp, stopping just short of causing her real pain. And then he released his hold on her arm as quickly as he'd caught it. She took a step back, nearly stumbling.

It had happened _so_ fast. Inhumanly fast. She cradled her wrist, her eyes wide, locked on him. She felt herself tremble pathetically.

His shoulders heaved with every harsh breath. He took a step back and looked down at his hands again - disoriented, unbelieving.

"Oh, Claire," he said sadly. The blood continued to drip down his chin.

She stood, frozen, her muscles tense and braced. She clutched her tank top in her hand left hand until her knuckles turned white.

He swallowed, wiping at his face, his eyes unfixed and distant. His voice nearly shook as he spoke. "I have to...learn…I'm trying to learn."

"Learn what?" she breathed. It was barely a whisper.

He looked up at her. "How to be touched… without…" He didn't finish.

"Fear," she said.

Because she understood.

Because she was learning too.

He closed his eyes and tilted his head back.

She cleared her throat, her shoulders relaxing, loosening her grip on the tank top. Her pulse fluttered, leveling itself. "It looks like it's slowing down."

She went to the sink, turned the tap and waited for the blisteringly hot water to turn cool. "That happen a lot? The bleeding?" she asked, looking over her shoulder as she soaked the tank top under the faucet.

"Somewhat frequently… as of late."

She twisted the shirt, wringing it out. "Do you know why?"

"Yes, I do."

"Come here," she said softly.

He obeyed her, and when he stood in front her, so close, she could feel his unnatural heat again. She imagined she could smell his blood, under the heavy cologne that transported her to balmy nights and strange, wary pleasure.

"You'll ruin that," he warned. She felt the breath of his words on her lips.

"Doesn't matter." Wrapped around her hand, she used the wet shirt to slowly wash the drying blood from his face. "So why are you bleeding?" She almost didn't ask, thinking it was better not to pry at the issue… but a needling anxiety had settled in her chest.

He took a deep breath. She continued to work, wiping his throat. "There is no layman's way to explain it other than… some months ago, I ceased taking a form of booster, if you will. A booster that my body, my immune system, had grown to rely upon. And now… the original virus I adapted to -"

"Some kind of t-virus," she interrupted, taking his bloodied hands in her own.

"Yes," he said. "And now, it's causing some minor tissue damage."

"Don't lie to me."

He paused. She waited, watching him, counting her desperate breaths and listening to his, slow and steady. When he spoke, his voice was strained.

"It will kill me in less than a year, at its current rate."

Her heart stopped, leaping to her throat.

It was only fair. All of the lives he'd taken with his creations, his diseases...and now the virus that had made him a demi-god would be his undoing.

It was fair.

It was right.

It was fair, and it was right, and it made her want to weep, and she didn't know why.

She pressed her lips together and forced herself to focus. _It wasn't fair. It wasn't. It was so cruelly unfair, after what they'd had… whatever it was, whatever he'd done to her, three nights now. Three nights that seemed like a lifetime, that seemed like forever, that seemed like a dream, like a story. And hadn't she earned that? Hadn't she earned one thing, one good thing that stayed, that didn't crumble to dust in her hands, didn't fall apart around her? Didn't she deserve someone who..._

She cleared her throat, blinking rapidly. She ran the wet shirt over his palms, and then down each impossibly long, elegant finger. She washed his hands until there was no more blood. "So take the booster," she suggested nonchalantly. Almost convincingly. She looked up, and he was watching her.

"It isn't that simple." He worried his bottom lip - oddly vulnerable. "I'll become infectious. Again."

His sperm, his spit…his blood. His body would be fatal to anyone not immune to his virus. But he would live. He would be alive.

And that could be enough for her. Maybe.

She nodded, returning the sink to rinse out her top. "So once…we, uh…figure all this out," she said, her hand just above her stomach. "You'll take it again, right?"

He was staring at her back. She could _feel_ it. "Yes."

"But in the meantime, you're just gonna keep risking this, your _life_ , or whatever?" She felt her temper rising, a prickling heat. She held herself against the edge of the sink, her fingers curling under the stainless steel edge. "To get the rest of us pregnant? That's your brilliant master plan?"

He hesitated. "I'm afraid I haven't thought so far ahead." He leaned on the countertop, crossing his arms. "You'll have to excuse the… indelicacy of my language, but our attempts to conceive are a pilot run for me." He looked down at his feet, briefly wiping under his nose again even though the bleeding had stopped. "I'm constantly recalibrating things."

"Hmm," she agreed.

Inside, she screamed. She felt as if a part of her shattered, turning into sharp edges, to slivers of jagged glass.

 _A pilot run._

She pulled the wet tank top on, tugging it down over her midriff. It was a small relief in the awful heat.

 _The sex they had...the things she'd let herself feel...were just a pilot run._

She studied the brown stains of his blood, all the way down the front of the shirt. She sighed. "Well… I hope it works soon. So you don't bleed to death, I guess."

Their eyes met. She tried to force a tight-lipped, condescending smile.

"I've upset you," he said, his pale eyebrows knitting together.

She'd failed at smiling. "I'm fine. What did you come here to talk about again?" She just wanted him to leave, _just leave her the fuck alone to deal with whatever mindgames he was playing now, just leave her be so she could get her damn head on straight and stop this ridiculous shit from-_

"I have something to attend to today. I'll be absent this afternoon, probably well into the evening-"

"Okay," she snapped. Her temper still flared, sparking and searing just beneath her skin. She barely heard a word he said. _Pilot run_ echoed around her, seeming to bounce off the metal appliances, the polished counters, the white tile of the kitchen.

His eyes were wide and warm, even in the face of her anger - he had the audacity to look _wounded_ , after what he'd said, to _her_.

 _Pilot. Run._

She was his guinea pig. She had _always_ been his guinea pig. She was an idiot for pretending this was anything else, even for a moment.

And whenever he succeeded in knocking her up... _if_ he succeeded at all...he was just going to crawl between someone else's legs. _Some other sorry guinea pig._

She couldn't let herself slip. Not again. She had to keep the glaring truth in the forefront of her mind. She had to defend herself, always, because no one else in the world would.

"I imagined I might see you tonight," he said with considerable difficulty, his voice cutting through the bitter torrent of her thoughts. "At your villa, or mine, whichever you prefer."

And then he looked at her, like he was waiting. Waiting for a sign, maybe. Waiting for her to throw herself into his arms. Waiting for her to swallow his half-truth, to choke it down, to spend another night wrapped up in his web.

She ran her hand over her hair. Her chest hurt. "I don't think that's a good idea. Until I'm fertile again."

He inhaled, so loud she could hear it. After a moment, he nodded, his soft red gaze averting.

"Yes. That's prudent, Miss Redfield." He knocked on the metal countertop, as if he didn't know what to do with his graceful hands. "The best course of action."

* * *

The overhanging trees didn't offer much respite from the heat.

 _Nothing_ offered much respite from the heat. Leon made his way up the path to the kitchen, sticking to the sparse patches of shade. Even there, the humidity was thick enough to leave him feeling strangled, like there were cobwebs clinging to the walls of his lungs.

He hated the island. He'd hated the island since day one.

He never thought they'd survive long enough for him to keep on hating it.

But he was still here. Slogging up and down the same paths. Hauling the same loads of brush and rocks. Treating the same blisters on his palms. Eating the same fish and shrimp and cans of whatever slop they could dig up. Waking up to the same _fucking_ seagulls screeching outside his window at the crack of dawn.

If there was anything he hated more than the island, it was a _routine._

He breathed out a sigh into the damp air, and swore it fanned out before him like steam in a shower. He'd spent a week in Bedok once, where even the breezes felt sluggish and heavy. But there, he could tackle the unrelenting climate with a bottomless Singapore Sling whenever he needed it.

Here...he had a few palm fronds to duck under, if he was lucky.

He ran a hand over his face, and pushed his sweat-damp hair from his eyes. He hoped to god the fans in the kitchen were on. And if not, he could always lock himself in the walk-in freezer. Grab one of those Kronenbourg 1664s, while they lasted. That'd be nice. Just settle back against a crate of freezer burnt bacon, or whatever was left in there, close his eyes, and _relax_ for once…

He heard the snap of twigs just ahead. The sound of overgrown foliage being pushed away. Heavy footsteps on the rocks and roots.

And then, around the bend, Wesker appeared. Walking - _stalking_ \- down the path.

Leon wondered if he'd ever get used to seeing him this way. The world's most notorious bioterrorist was trudging towards him, head down, hands shoved in the pockets of his shorts.

Cargo shorts.

Looking… _dejected,_ maybe? It was hard to read his face beneath the omnipresent sunglasses and trademark scowl, but there was a weight to him. A dark cloud lingering over him as he came nearer.

Wesker looked up as they approached one another. Leon stopped short, expecting him to do the same - but he barreled forward, clearing the distance between them in a few long strides.

Before he reached Leon, he scowled. His features twisted and his gait stiffened.

And Leon - narrowing his eyes - stepped aside, into a bramble of scrub and catch weed. The short sleeve of his shirt snagged on the stinging thorns.

Wesker didn't turn as he walked by. He didn't say a word. But Leon could feel those inhuman eyes on him beneath the dark lenses - red, and raw, and furious.

 _He absolutely hated it here._

He picked a thorn from the fabric of his shirt, stepping back onto the path. He watched Wesker disappear into the overgrowth of trees and moss, following the trail... _wherever_ the fuck it led.

He didn't care where Wesker was going. What he was doing. What he was thinking.

And after waking up from a cryogenic coma, with a dry mouth and a sour stomach and a spinning head...after stepping onto the blinding white sand, and learning that the world he'd called home had dissolved into nothing...he didn't _care_ what anyone thought.

Right now, he just wanted that fucking beer.

That, and fifteen minutes to himself. Ten, even. No work. No worries about what needed to be patched, what needed weatherproofing, what was broken, old, useless, needed rebuilding…

No Claire Redfield doing some kind of half-jog down the trail, her top covered in red-brown blotches.

Her pace stuttered a little when she saw him. She raised her hand, almost a wave, then tucked an invisible strand of hair behind her ear.

"Hey," he said. He nodded in greeting. She seemed more than a little thrown-off about running into him.

Running into him. Here. On this island with less than a dozen people to _run into._

His eyes drifted from her Rorschach-splattered tank, to her flushed cheeks and loose, wild bun. The Redfields weren't exactly known for being overly concerned about their appearances… but she looked like strung-out mess.

"Hey Lee." She sounded breathless. She peered around him, narrowing her eyes at the sun-dappled path.

Leon smiled. "You haven't called me that in _years_ ," he said. _Lee_. An affectionate nickname only his mother and Claire had ever used. It sent him back, in the best possible way. A better time. A better world.

A better bed, with her in it on occasion.

She smiled back uneasily. "I didn't uh… sorry. I'm sorry."

"No worries. Is that _blood_?" he asked, gesturing at the stains all over her wet tank top.

She looked down, pressed her hands flat to her stomach. "This? No… no, I just… spilled something, in the kitchen."

"Was he in there with you?"

She paused, swallowing. Her lips pursed for a strange beat. "Who?"

"Wesker." Leon crossed his arms.

" _What_?" She laughed. "No! I would've been screaming. Come on."

He nodded, probably looking every inch the interrogating cop. "Yeah. I just… saw him though."

"Going which way?" she asked seriously. "What direction?"

"Down into the woods? Not headed back to the beach." He turned to look down the path that forked into the thick foliage and back up to the main resort. "Probably came from that garden shed, or whatever else is up there." He jerked his chin towards the kitchen, and the groundskeeper buildings.

"Yeah. Weird." She raised her eyebrows, staring off into the jungle. "He's really… terrifying. We should watch him. Closely."

Leon studied her ruddy face. "You alright, Redfield?"

She took a deep breath and her unfocused blue eyes turned to him, suddenly hard and concerned. "Are you doing anything right now? Are you busy?"

He frowned. "No, we finished the line at-"

She grabbed his arm. "Would you do me a favor? Would you inventory the pantry? Please?"

He looked down at her hand against his arm. "I...yeah? Sure? Why do you-"

"I did most of it already...there's like, maybe, two shelves left." She was talking very quickly then. She let her hand drop away. "My notes are on the counter. It'll take you a half hour, _tops_. I swear."

"Why don't we —" he started.

But she had already rushed past him.

"I owe you one, Lee," she tossed out over her sun-burnt shoulder… and then she was gone.

* * *

To her surprise, following Wesker wasn't a terribly difficult task. She caught glimpses of him through the trees, at the curves and bends in the caretaker's trail.

He never turned around. Not even once.

He'd just followed the path at a steady, measured pace, for a very long time… and she just followed it behind him, with the sweat pouring down her back and gathering on the backs of her knees in the suffocating midday heat.

The jungle was alive with the calls of exotic birds she didn't know the names of. A cacophony of trills and whistles and cries bored down on her from above. She was amazed at how much _noise_ they all made, drowning out the careless crunching of her footfalls. In places, the trail was obscured by vines and branches that had grown over in its disuse. She stepped over wild plants with strange, vibrant flowers that bloomed towards the green sunlight, filtered through the tangled canopy above them. Mosquitos buzzed around her face lazily until she batted them away, cursing.

And then… after what had surely been two miles, he veered off the path, straight into the trees. She hesitated when she reached the spot where he'd disappeared, looking around, her hands in her hair, and then on her hips. Shaking her head, she wiped the sweat from her face and went into the thicket after him.

* * *

She had known there was a river that cut through the island. She hadn't realized how very wide it was. Long boats with ramshackle motors bobbed up and down on the undulating current, and mismatched stilt houses with metal roofs were built like a colorful staircase all the way up the southern side.

The water was brown with stirred up silt, and it lapped quietly at the muddy banks, where... _children_ ran and laughed riotously, chasing fast little crabs that dodged in and out of bubbling holes.

There were people around a communal brick oven, plucking the feathers from some limp fowl and talking jovially in another language, the crack of a meat cleaver punctuating their animated conversation. Women hung up wet clothes on wires that ran between the windows of the houses, men sat in a circle - on chairs, and rocks, and overturned buckets - cleaning fish in the water that came up to their knees. A girl carried a woven basket full of dark green leaves on her head, scolding a boy who followed her, hauling a sack over his shoulder.

There were _humans_ everywhere she looked. _Real_ people. They were normal, and healthy, and there were dozens of them.

Her heart raced as she counted.

Forty-seven. Probably - _definitely -_ more. It was a village. A village, full of survivors, less than three miles away. And no one back at the resort had any idea.

Wesker stood in the middle of it all, his hands clasped behind his back, his sunglasses in place. A young woman in a headwrap stood in front of him, gesturing to spot in the steep bank where the grass and brush had been cleared. When she spoke, he nodded seriously and turned to look at the barren patch. An older man with graying hair approached them, his bold patterned shirt tucked into his high-waisted khaki pants. He took off his wire-rim glasses and rubbed at the lenses with a handkerchief. The woman smiled at him, and Wesker shook his hand in a familiar way. The man leaned into the group, saying something with a grin on his face… and all three of them _laughed_.

Claire swallowed. It was hard to breathe. Her thoughts raced and froze and jumbled up like a car accident in her mind, all twisted metal and screeching brakes. Her very sense of reality was blown apart by the discovery: _Who were these people? Had they been here all along? Why hadn't he told them? Why would he keep this from them? From her?_

 _Had the world actually even... ended?_

Something cold brushed against her temple. She knew what it was immediately.

A gun.

"Usisonge, nyekundu." A deep, rolling voice.

She winced, squeezing her eyes shut. The barrel of the gun pressed up against the side of her face, firm and unwavering. Her chest and stomach heaved with her labored breaths.

"Don't do this," she said, barely above a whisper. "The man down there? Albert Wesker? I know him. He's a friend, right? He's a friend to both of us. I'm just a survivor… like you."

The man pushed the end of the gun into her cheek. Her lips quivered. And then the weapon was gone.

She opened her eyes slowly, daring to look at the direction of the baritone voice. Her eyes drifted from his heavy boots, to his camouflage combat trousers, up his clean white t-shirt, to his dark well-muscled arms. He stared down at her where she was crouched in the leaves and grass, the beretta still in his hand, hanging at his side. She looked into his eyes.

"You're _nothing_ like me," he said with a charming African accent.

And then his mouth blossomed like the barbed maw of some carnivorous plant, his jaw bursting apart into four dripping petals.

Claire didn't even have time to scream.


	9. Nyekundu

**Chapter Nine:** **Nyekundu**

"In that book which is my memory,  
On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,  
Appear the words, 'Here begins a new life'."  
― _Dante Alighieri_

* * *

 _ **Present.**_

A steady rain began to fall as he sat in Teka's makeshift office. The man squinted down at the bloodwork Wesker had brought from the ship's lab. Squinted down at his own scribbled page of notes. Tutted to himself, shaking his head.

 _Si nzuri,_ he said.

 _Not good._

Wesker sighed. He let his head fall back against the wall. The worn leather chair creaked beneath him.

Teka spoke quickly - enough so that even Wesker had to strain to translate, sorting through the man's rapidfire speech. "How long did the bleeding last this time?"

"Not long," Wesker answered, in his own poorly-accented Swahili. His gaze was distant and unfocused, as he stared just over the doctor's shoulder.

Teka scowled. "But longer than the last."

"Yes."

The doctor tapped his pencil, nearly worn down to a nub, against the notebook. "Your camp across the river...you have spoursop trees?"

"A few."

Teka nodded. "Harvest the leaves. Steep them, drink the tea. It may help slow degeneration."

Wesker closed his eyes. He listened to the rain patter on the roof, and spill over the gutters.

 _Degeneration._ He felt horribly dizzy after the trek through the heat. Every muscle seemed to ache. He could feel the fibers pulling, feel the tendons and ligaments throbbing with strain. His lungs were heavy with humid air, and he could feel the strange stuttering of his heart as the organ struggled in vain against the virus...

"Two cups a day. Tastes like shit," Teka muttered darkly.

Wesker cracked a faint smile. He'd been working with the doctor since ceasing his boosters. The meetings were tenuous and strained, at first - Teka had little reason to _aid_ someone who had turned him into something not quite human. Into something different, something other.

 _Wicked people._ What a name for the aging man who stood before him now. A man who, after time, began talking with Wesker during their meetings - about his fondness of early morning walks along the river. About the patch of vivid red heliconia that had begun blooming along the edge of the forest. About the best spice rub for seared tuna steaks, and the fear of needles he'd struggled to overcome, and how he missed printed newspapers.

A man who'd left his home for Cape Town, completing medical school, specializing in pathology. A man who'd returned to Kijuju years later, when the outbreak first began, leaving his ailing wife, his two adult sons, his four young grandchildren for what he thought would be no more than a month.

"You may want to try yarrow root as well," Teka continued. Wesker looked to him. "Dried and powdered. If you mix it into a paste, it can stop bleeding. I have some-"

A young girl raced by, shouting something to her friend, cutting the doctor short. He sighed wearily, turning towards the open door. "Asha! Quiet!"

"There's someone here!" the girl yelled over her shoulder as she hurried through the drizzle of rain. "From across the river!"

Wesker lurched forward, away from the wall, his spine ramrod-straight. Teka turned back to him, frowning. "Who came with you?"

"No one." He strained to hear what was happening in the center of the village over the dull pounding of the rain. He could barely make out the murmur of worried voices, the sound of hurried footsteps on wooden stairs.

Teka walked towards the door, peering out into the grey mist that rose from the river. Wesker followed behind him. Something like lead had settled in his stomach, heavy, leaving him unsteady and anxious.

His thoughts raced. _Who would have been foolish enough to follow him? Who wouldn't turn back after the first, the second mile, after he left the path to tread through the thicket? How had he not noticed them - a sound, a scent, the feeling of a threat on his heels?_

The doctor shouted for a young man who was walking towards the village center. They spoke in curt, clipped tones - words Wesker half-listened to as he focused on the noise outside. Water sloshing, boats bobbing, unfinished questions from a dozen different voices, exclamations and conversations weaving in and out of one another.

 _Perhaps it was Jill, though she had no reason to follow him. She knew of the Majini camp across the river. Chris would certainly be suspicious enough to track his every move, but was as subtle as a raging bull. Leon...Leon had seen him leaving the kitchens...though he couldn't imagine why he would-_

 _Nyekundu,_ the man said to Teka.

Wesker's blood froze in his veins. His weary heart stuttered, catching in his throat.

 _Nyekundu._

* * *

 _ **November 12, 1991.**_

"You can stop that now," he said.

She stood over him, her legs straddling his, her stance surprisingly steady given the height of the heels she wore. He was halfway to impressed with how she moved; if she hadn't been quite so obscene, he might have mistaken her for someone who studied ballet. She looked down at him and took a slow step back.

"Thank you," he said, slipping his hands into the pockets of his coat.

"You don't want the dance?" Her voice was raspier than he'd imagined it would be. Deeper, too. Her accent was _almost_ Russian. She sounded like a cartoon, and she looked even _more_ like one. The bottle-red hair, too imperfect to have been a wig, the duckbill lip injections, the Baywatch breasts. A caricature, drawn by some pimple-faced teenager when his mother was wasn't watching.

"No, I don't want the dance." He smiled, tight and closed.

"Your friend already paid." She sounded annoyed.

"Yes… that he did." Wesker glanced through the gap in the dark velvet curtains. Will was at the bar, talking with a young man who was polishing glasses. A strobe light passed over them. Will smiled and loosened his tie.

"Your choice," she said, drawing Wesker's impassive attention back to her. Specifically to her buttocks, which he decided were surgically enhanced as he watched her, bending over to retrieve her spandex minidress off the carpet.

 _Carpet. In a strip club._ He suppressed a shiver, grimacing.

"You want me to leave it off?" She asked over her bare shoulder, perfectly casual.

"No, please. Get dressed." He gestured, crossing his legs.

She pulled the garment on, tugging at the hem until it clung her upper thighs like a second skin. "So what is it? You want to talk?" She dropped into an over-stuffed chair that was shaped like a platform shoe. Her acrylic manicure glowed beneath the black lights of the private dance room.

"I don't particularly want to talk, no."

She crossed her arms, nearly pushing her breasts to her throat. "No dance… no conversation… why are you here? Making someone jealous?"

He sighed. He should have never let Will pick one out for him.

"Humor me, Drago," she smiled slyly.

"Drago?" He asked, smiling back, condescending.

She picked at her nails, her heeled foot bouncing. "Drago. Rocky IV."

He blinked, shaking his head.

"Rocky? The best American movie?"

"Oh, please. I couldn't make it through the first film… let alone the fourth," he said drolly.

It was her turn to sigh. Her dark eyes rolled up dramatically.

He held his breath for a moment, his gaze narrowed and hard on her. And for a reason he couldn't comprehend himself, he nudged the curtain aside so that Will was in her line of vision. "The man who paid for your…time—". He nodded in the direction of the bar. "He brings me here, every year, for my birthday."

She squinted at Will through cigarette smoke and low light. "How terrible," she deadpanned.

Wesker let the curtain fall back in place. He wiped his hand back and forth across his thigh and pointedly ignored her sarcasm. "Truly."

"And you suffer it so nicely... for him."

"Yes."

"Why?" She adjusted one of the thin gold bangles on her wrist.

"He's my partner… we work very closely. Appearances are important. And this ritual… this facade, allows him to pretend he's not gay, for one more year."

"You don't approve of homosexuality?" She asked. Her English was good, her grasp of semantics and her fluency nearly perfect. She crossed her legs too, mimicking his pose. The pale arch of her foot was beautiful.

He looked away. "I don't care who _anyone_ takes to bed. In truth, I'd prefer not to know."

"What about his wife? She would care."

Wesker smirked; she must have noted the ring. "I think that his _wife_ ," he said the word more caustically than he'd intended to. "Would be relieved if he admitted he was gay. It would put her out of her misery."

She nodded, as if she understood the situation _completely_ , and let her head fall back against the chair. She watched him through half-lidded eyes. "And you?"

"And me?"

"You are gay too."

He guffawed. " _No_." He paused and then asked quite seriously: "Why would you say that?"

She laced her fingers together. "The suit. The hair. Not many of your kind here."

He couldn't stop himself from smiling, incredulous. " _My_ kind?"

"Look around," she invited him.

He didn't have to search; there was a trucker no more than ten feet away, a petite dancer struggling to perform around his astounding gut.

Wesker turned back to the redhead.

"You don't want a dance either." She grinned. "You _must_ be gay."

"Or perhaps you're not my type." He was on the verge of laughing.

"I am _everybody's_ type," she said.

Before he could rebuff her taunt, the song ended. A dj said something unintelligible into a staticy microphone. She stood, and so did he. He fished into his back pocket for his wallet.

Her hand was warm on his arm, even through the layers of his fine clothes. She stopped him. "No. It was pleasurable," she said.

"It was _a_ pleasure," he corrected her, gently.

She shrugged, her eyes glittering and mischievous. "It was _a pleasure_. Happy birthday, Drago."

* * *

 _ **November 20, 1991.**_

He _knew_ she noticed him the very _second_ he walked back into that club. He knew because he was well over six feet tall and impossibly blond and fatally handsome, and because he'd turned the head of every other dancer working that night.

But she didn't even make eye contact with him, finishing her dance on the main stage while dim spotlights and shimmering mirrored balls played over her features. She had the arrogance to ignore a man like _him_ , like _Albert Wesker_ , catering instead to someone who could have been her kindly balding grandfather. Her back arched as she slid down the shining silver pole, her eyes were dramatic and hungry, and her quick tongue darted over her wanton bottom lip just before her teeth caught it in some exaggerated expression of lust.

She was disgusting.

She was captivating.

He'd thought of nothing but her pornographic visage since his birthday; he'd felt such a strange cocktail of desire and repulsion, and the dichotomy of it had driven him back to that god-forsaken club the sleazy town over from Mayberry-inspired Raccoon City.

There were no strippers in Raccoon, he knew - there wasn't even alcohol on Sundays.

She strode the catwalk stage, picking up the dollars her leering patrons had haphazardly tossed at her platformed feet. Wesker stalked the length of the bar alongside her.

"Drago," she smiled, wadding the cash and staring down at him. He could just make out the unreasonable length of her false eyelashes.

"I reject the comparison," he replied.

"You watched the movie?" She sounded entertained by the idea. She approached the stairs at the side of the stage, and he lifted his hand to help her descend in her towering heels.

"I did," he said, memorizing the sensation of her skin on his, their palms and fingers so briefly engaged. "I have about as much in common with Ivan Drago as you do with Mother Theresa."

She laughed. "You look just like him."

Another girl took the stage. The DJ announced her. A few cheers went up.

"A bit. But I'm no one's pet goon," he said.

" _No one's goon_? Dressed like that? Really?" she mocked.

He glanced down at himself. "I'm a scientist."

"Yes, and I'm a nun."

"I am," he argued. "I'm a virologist."

"What are you doing here again?" she asked, pulling on the silk robe a bartender handed her.

He took a deep breath and watched her coworker collapse to her spread knees, her hips pistoning lewdly against the stage. A few men encouraged her from their seats.

"That's Candy," she said, tying the robe at her waist. "I can introduce you."

"No," he nearly interrupted her. "No, I came to this shithole for you."

Smiling, she leaned back against the bar and looked him up and down.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Ruby Star."

He snorted. "What's your _real_ name?"

She laughed again, wagging a knowing finger at him.

He reached into his back pocket, held up his wallet. "I'll buy a dance, Ruby Star. Stay dressed. I'll pretend I don't want to talk."

She stared at him, narrowing her eyes… but the sly smile remained on her lips. "My shift is over, Drago."

He paused. "Coffee then."

"I don't do side work," she said, her countenance suddenly serious.

He frowned. "Side work?"

"I'm not a whore."

It was his turn to laugh. "If you were ever so lucky… you'd end up paying me."

She crossed her arms. Her hair was dark under the lights, and it tumbled over her narrow shoulders in a cascade of perfect waves. She shook her head, playing with the roll of dollar bills in her hand.

"Coffee. That's all," he said, and it sounded so much like begging.

She looked up at him from under the fake lashes, and rolled her eyes.

* * *

"You all doin' okay here?"

It was the third time in fifteen minutes that the waitress had stopped at their table, half a pot of luke-warm coffee in her hand.

"Fine… and I'll let you know, hmm?" he smiled coldly into his mug as he took a sip of the stale French roast.

The waitress, an older heavy-set woman with roller-curled hair - perhaps a mother, more likely a grandmother - smiled back tightly. She glanced at his companion, _again_...he'd lost count of how many times now…before walking away.

Ruby Star sank into the booth, the cracked leather squeaking beneath her. The collar of her fox fur coat swallowed her pale neck, framing her face like a little mane, and flecks of chunky blue glitter shone on her painted eyelids in the harsh light of the diner just off 82. She'd traded her platform heels for a pair of ratty Converse high-tops, but she still looked entirely the part of a sex worker.

She played with the smudged spoon beside her mug. "Does it bother you?" she asked.

He reached across the table - the top of it sticky with some unidentifiable substance - and plucked a packet of sugar from the wire basket. He shook it, frowning at the solidified contents. "Does what bother me?" A chunk of sugar dropped into the coffee, splashing a few drops onto the table.

"Me…like this. And you… like that," she said quietly, her eyes darting to his. "Everyone is staring."

He stopped stirring the coffee, setting the teaspoon down on his carefully folded napkin. He crossed his arms and leaned on the table. He kept his eyes locked with hers. "It doesn't bother me. They're envious of you. Your freedom." He raised the mug back to his lips, taking a careful sip. "And after all, you're _everybody's type_."

She hummed, arching her thin, sculpted brow. And then she looked down into the contents of her cup, her unsinkable confidence seeming to have met its iceberg. "Maybe," she said, a little too quietly.

He sat his mug down. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He traced the perfect circle of condensation from his icewater. "So. _Ruby Star,_ " he said in a ruminative sort of voice, hoping to distract her. "I think it's time you tell me your real name, isn't it?"

"So soon?" she asked, a hint of a smile catching in the corner of her lips.

"Perhaps it's old fashioned of me…" He leaned back, studying her face. "But I believe proper introductions are in order after seeing someone topless."

"Ekaterina Muller," she replied, pursing her lips against the growing smile. The exotic sound rolled off her tongue like a purr.

"Ekaterina?" He smiled, too, as he butchered her name.

"Ekaterina."

" _E_ katerina."

She shook her head. "Yeh-kah-trina."

" _You_ -katrina."

" _Kat_. Just Kat for you." She laughed. "Kat."

"And Mueller? M-U-E-L-L-E-R?" he asked, lifting the mug to his lips.

She shook her head. "M-U-L. More American, yes?"

He nodded in agreement.

"Your friend. He called you _Al_." She narrowed her eyes at him expectantly.

"Albert Wesker," he said. He extended his hand to her. They shook for the first time, both smiling across the dull formica table.

"A German name, like mine," she said. "My father was from Brussels. My mother was from Moscow."

He nodded again. "And you're from Russia?"

"No. I was born in Edonia." She swallowed and then licked her swollen lips, almost nervously.

"Edonia," he repeated, leaning back into the seat. "A lot of civil unrest there."

"Always," she agreed. "Have you ever seen a twelve year old with an assault rifle?" She looked at him and then away, sighing. "So many little crying boys, forced to play soldier. It would break your heart."

"Are you a refugee?"

"No, no," she frowned. "I came here in 1988 on student visa."

"What are you studying?" He smiled again.

"Cognitive Psychology." She nearly beamed as she spoke. She straightened proudly in her booth.

"Really? Well." He held the mug between his hands and regarded her thoughtfully. She was more than simply _unpredictable._ She was unlike anyone he'd ever met before.

"And where are you from, Drago?" She stretched out her legs under the table, propping her feet up on his seat.

"Originally?" He set the mug down and straightened his coat. "I…have no idea. I was adopted, very young."

She pressed her lips to a thin, serious line, her brows knitting together. "By a good family?"

He took a steadying breath and collected his thoughts. "Not exactly. Just a wealthy old man, who saw potential."

She frowned, and was quiet.

He cleared his throat. "It wasn't a... _terrible_ childhood." He felt weak under her too-knowing gaze. "A bit dull. Stiff. Demanding. Cold, at times." The excuses piled up, boring their way to the surface. His heart was in his mouth, heavy and cumbersome, tasting of metal. He kept saying _words_ , words that didn't begin to describe his past, words that didn't mean a thing at all, and he wished that _she would just stop him, just say something to stop the -_

"A boy should never grow up without his mother," she said then, very plainly.

He stared at her. "What? Why?"

It was her turn to lean in. She spoke in a very measured tone, as if presenting in front of her professor. "It was an unpopular thought in my classes… but children need the other parent, above all."

"The opposite sex parent?" He tilted his head.

"Yes. A daughter and a father. A son and his mother. That is most important." She laced her fingers together, as if to signify the strength of her words.

"I'm sure your feminist peers adore this theory," he said dryly.

"They _hated_ it," she grinned. Her accent was so charming and thick that his face, unused to such emotion, _ached_ from smiling at her. "But!" She raised her finger up, as if making a key point in an argument that didn't exist. "It is not anti-feminist. I _am_ a feminist." Her voice climbed passionately. "I am! Women should do _whatever_ they want. I do whatever I want, yes? No matter what the waitresses think, right?"

He could only nod and grin.

"Boys and their mothers? Girls and their fathers? The strongest bond. The most important. I'll tell you why."

He rested his chin in his hand and waited for her to continue.

"A boy's first love is his mother."

His heart stuttered.

"A girl's first love is her father," she continued, lowly, reverently. "The rejection… the loss of first love, before it is the right time… will destroy the child, inside. _Here_." She touched her chest.

He stared at her, feeling saliva gather in his mouth, under his tongue, threatening to drown him.

"And who teaches this child then?" She looked at him, her blue eyes wide and full and serious. "Who teaches him how to _love_? So that he is not another boy with a rifle?"

As he sat across from her, listening to her… he could only think of his pale, young self, a deconstructed gun, and his bloodied knuckles.

"What kind of scientist drives a Jaguar?" she asked suddenly, staring out the passenger window at the distant night sky. Her breath fogged on the glass.

"You'd be surprised," he said as they came to a stop. The red light looked haloed through the windshield. It was bitterly cold; he fussed with the temperature controls, felt the hot air blast at them from the dash. He warmed his aching hands between his thighs as he waited for the light to change.

"I'm sure." She glanced at him.

The light turned green. There were no other cars on the road. The empty asphalt seemed to stretch on forever into the dark.

"I work in Research and Development." He paused, his turn signal clicking loudly in the silence. "There's quite a bit of money to be made in defense contracts."

"You mean government work?" Her voice was controlled, as if she was trying not to scare him out of being truthful. "Like… weapons?"

"Something like that. More on the… biological end."

" _Biological end_?"

"Yes," he said, and held his breath, silently willing her not to ask any more questions about the subject.

"Park there." She pointed to a spot near the east entrance. He was grateful for the interruption.

She lived in an lower-middle class part of town. Her apartment was on the third floor of an old converted school. She undid the lock, and then opened the door. She flipped a lightswitch just inside, and the entryway was illuminated in yellow. She stood in the threshold and looked at him, expectant.

"Well?" she asked, holding the door. "Are you coming in?"

He hesitated, running a nervous hand over his hair. "You don't owe me this."

"I know," she said, smiling kindly for the first time that night. "Please come in, Drago."

She took his coat and draped it over the back of the couch in her little living room while he stepped out of his dress shoes on her doormat. She busied herself turning on more lights, and his hard gaze greedily drank in each newly revealed space. Her windows were hung with colorful blankets instead of blinds, and each doorframe was decorated with Christmas lights, tacked into the wood. There was a beaded curtain that led into her modest galley kitchen, and he caught a glimpse of the neatly organized pots and pans she kept on the countertop when she disappeared inside.

"Would you like a drink?" she called to him.

He heard the faucet run. "Water, thank you."

"No alcohol?" she asked then.

"Not usually," he said, looking at the beige carpet beneath his socked feet. Freshly vacuumed. Her furniture was newer, strikingly sleek and modern, in juxtaposition to the tie-dyed blankets and hippie lights. He ran a finger along the surface of her low coffee table; spotlessly clean glass, his reflection shining back up at him. There was a half-burned cone of incense in a ceramic tray, and all he could smell was sandalwood.

She was the strangest woman he'd ever met in his life.

"I don't drink either. But I keep wine, for cooking," she said. She handed him the glass. Ice cubes clinked against the sides.

"Cheers," he said.

* * *

"You aren't what I thought you'd be," she said as they lay together in the dark.

The alarm clock next to the bed read out 3:47 AM in bright orange. "What did you think I'd be?" he asked, his voice husky with sleep.

He felt her sit up beside him. "I don't know. Cruel, maybe? I thought you might want to hurt me."

He frowned and pulled the pillow up under his chest. "No," he said. He took a deep breath. "Would you have let me… hurt you?"

She swallowed. "I think so, yes."

"Are you disappointed?" he asked.

"No, just surprised." She smoothed the blanket, absent. "It is a rare thing… for a man to surprise me."

"Tell me a secret," he said softly, his eyes heavy.

"You are very romantic when you are tired, Drago," she teased in a soft voice. "A secret… hmm. My student visa expired last month. I cannot renew it."

"Why?"

"Because I dropped out of university over a year ago." She laughed to herself.

"You're a bad girl," he scolded, his words muffled by the pillow.

"I know…very bad." She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. It was too dark to tell, but he imagined they sparkled. "Your turn. Tell me a secret. Tell me the _biggest_ secret."

His eyes were not so heavy then. The silence in the bedroom was deafening. "I don't have any secrets," he finally said, even and lifeless.

"Everyone has secrets." She yawned. "One day, you will tell them all, and they will not scare you so much."

She turned over next to him, pulling the blanket up to her chin. She pressed against him, the naked skin of her back on the naked skin of his. They shared the common warmth. He heard her breathing slow, and she was deeply asleep soon after.

But he peered into the darkness, unblinking. Awake. Alone, with all the horrible secrets he didn't have.

* * *

 _ **Present.**_

Without pausing, without thinking, Wesker shouldered past the doctor, out into the rain, into the rolling steam and the heavy scent of the jungle and the river.

Teka called after him. People stopped, stared, hurried out of his way as he walked - then ran, slow, too slow, like slogging through a swamp, _why couldn't he move faster why did his muscles ache with every step why why why_ \- towards the source of the commotion.

Towards the path he stood on just moments ago. Towards the little crowd that had gathered in a half-circle, whispering, watching.

Towards her. _Nyekundu._ Red hair sticking to her face and throat. Red blood staining her shirt. Red, raw panic clawing at the edges of his vision, scratching his chest.

A man held a gun to her head.

His eyes locked with hers, wide and blue and flickering with fear. Her lips parted, as though she meant to call out to him. He pushed through the group, ignoring startled cries, the rain on his face, the pounding in his chest and in his temples...reaching his arm out towards her...not knowing he meant to do…

" _Simama."_

The woman's voice was firm. She stepped away from the crowd, motioning for the guard to hold steady behind Claire.

"Explain this." Her eyes flashed with a dark glare as she looked to Wesker.

He did not know the woman - Miriam - well. She had a piercing gaze and a sharp tongue and she did not mince words. The Majini had rallied behind her on the ship, and on the island, she had become their leader. The woman who spoke for them. Protected them.

She stood before him now with her shoulders squared and her eyes narrowed.

He took a deep breath, one that burned as it filled his lungs. He looked back to Claire. She stared at him, frightened and confused.

 _Three miles through the jungle. Three miles through brush and undergrowth, and he hadn't heard her. Hadn't thought to turn around. His senses were dull. His guard was down. Three miles._

"She...followed me…" he said, the words broken, tangling, as he attempted to translate through the awful fog of his thoughts. "She isn't a threat-"

"Why did she follow you?"

He hesitated. He shook his head, grasping for answers.

He knew Claire was trying desperately to decipher the conversation. Her gaze darted from him to Miriam and back again. He could _feel_ the panic coursing through her. He could see the way her muscles tightened, the way her pulse fluttered in her throat as she turned her head away from the muzzle of the pistol.

 _Stay still,_ he begged voicelessly. _Please, stay still._

"He found her on the embankment," Miriam pressed, jerking her chin towards the forest. "Watching the village. Do you use her as your guard dog, now that the white-haired girl has lost her collar?"

"No." His jaw clenched. "I promise you-"

" _You promise_. What does that mean to you?" Miriam hissed, pointing at him. "You promised us seclusion. You promised us _safety._ From _them._ "

"She isn't a threat," he said again, as evenly as he could manage. It was difficult to think in English, to speak in Swahili, when the world itself seemed to be tilting beneath him. He felt as though he were losing his balance with it. "Your people are safe. She won't...she wouldn't…"

He grasped at thoughts, at stray threads with frayed ends. He felt the warm, wet air throb around him, and he looked into Claire's eyes, blue, too blue, and he felt like he was dizzy, drowning…

" _My people_ are tired of your empty words." Miriam cut through his stammering. "You tell us we are _safe_ … and yet… there is so much blood on your hands, Doctor."

She waved her arm, and from the corner of his eye, he saw three armed men step away from the group, converging towards him. The warmth of the jungle floor turned the air to mist. It unfurled around them, clouds at their feet. It all seemed as real as a dream.

Until he heard the echoing click of a gun cocking.

He saw Claire close her eyes, and stumble as the guard pushed her forward, down to her knees.

" _Miriam_ ," he snapped. "For the love of god, stop this!"

She held up her hand, halting the guard. "Why should I? What _tender mercies_ have her people shown mine?"

He ground his teeth, his soaked hair plastered to his forehead, his eyes glowing brightly in the rain.

"Say it," she growled at him. "Say it out loud."

Wesker was silent, his chest heaving.

Claire sucked in a shivering breath as the muzzle of the pistol dug deeper into the base of her skull.

"She's pregnant with my child! You know it! You can _smell_ it," he finally cried, his words and spittle and horrible, aching desperation washing away in the downpour. " _Goddamnit_ , enough!"

* * *

 _ **January 24, 1992.**_

Wesker glanced at the clock, just above the door. It was half-past eight. He shook out the sleeve of his lab coat and eyed his watch, confirming the late hour. Birkin was never this late. Never. Not _once_ in the fifteen years they'd worked together. It wasn't unusual for him to be hungover, strung out, half-coherent, unshaved and reeking of the night before...but he always managed to drag himself in.

He felt a bit of moisture under his arms; the lab coat felt unsettlingly hot. Every time he tried to concentrate on the report, he was distracted by the sound of someone walking past, or the chime of the elevator, or a conversation down the hall in another laboratory.

 _Tonight, of all nights._ Wesker pinched the bridge of his nose, shutting his eyes tightly. The glow of the fluorescent lights left spots behind his lids. There was still a week's worth of data on specimen 1024 to archive. He exhaled heavily, the notes still swimming across his vision. _Unremarkable tissue regeneration. Impaired respiratory function. Continued degeneration of the cerebral cortex. Poor prognosis based on previous -_

The keypad in the hall chirped. The latch on the door clicked, and a rush of cool air filled the lab. He opened his eyes with a sigh, not bothering to glance towards the doorway. "It's about time," he muttered, reaching for the pile of notes. "If you knew how long I've been trying to decipher your chicken scratch..."

"You fucking idiot."

Wesker looked up then, brows raised, a chilly ' _pardon?'_ resting on the tip of his tongue. Birkin stood at the door. His face was hollow. His eyes were sunken. His jaw was unnaturally tense. His voice broke like splintered wood when he spoke.

"You absolute...fucking... _idiot,"_ he hissed. "Do you ever think of _anything..._ besides yourself?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Wesker laid the file on the lab table.

"Of course you don't. Why would you?" Birkin stormed into the room, the door whispering shut behind him. He crossed to his desk, snatching up the mug of day-old coffee. He tore into the drawer, rifling through it for his ever-present bottle of Crown Royal. "Why the _fuck_ would Albert Wesker stop to think, for one goddamn second, that he'd done anything wrong?"

"I have work to do," Wesker said, very stiffly. "Drink and sulk if you want to, but-"

"The stripper." He slammed the drawer closed. He slammed the bottle down. "The fucking _stripper._ From fucking Fantasies. _Are you out of your goddamn mind_?"

Wesker swallowed. "The stripper?" he asked, his voice wavering.

Birkin jerked his chin towards the door, speaking through clenched teeth. "You know where I just came from? I was _ambushed_ … by Spencer and your _cunt_ sister. They kept me in that office for an hour, Wesker. _An hour_."

"I'm sorry… why?" he asked, still feigning ignorance.

"Oh, cut the shit. Just stop. Stop," Birkin snapped. "It's pathetic."

Wesker crossed his arms and stepped back, away from the lab table, away from his partner.

"Did you think they wouldn't find out?" Birkin leaned heavily on the desk, shoulders sagging beneath some invisible weight. He raked a hand through his hair. "You've been fucking her for weeks now. You're distracted. You're sloppy. You knew they'd drag me into it, have me clean up after your shit."

"I don't know what there is to _clean up_ after." Wesker kept his voice measured. "What I do outside the lab doesn't…"

Birkin cut him off with a laugh. It was hollow, and empty, and almost disbelieving. "I have a family, Wesker. You know that? I have a wife, and a kid. I have a _real life,_ outside these walls. Not just some teenage rebellion _bullshit,_ " he sneered.

"Will, I don't -"

"You are playing with our _lives_. Do you understand? Can you process that?" Birkin snarled. "You could get us all _killed_."

"I wasn't aware you were my babysitter -"

"Yes. Yes, you were. You've known it from the beginning." Birkin reached for the bottle again, unscrewing the cap. "You've always known what _this_ was. You're _the genius_ , and I'm here to keep you on track. Stop you from doing stupid shit. And I failed." He poured a heavy splash of whiskey into his mug, and drained the contents in several gulps.

"You ought to slow down, don't you think?" Wesker asked, one last attempt to gain control over the situation.

He wiped his lips on the sleeve of his lab coat, and glared at Wesker, regarded him with nothing less than pure contempt. "I don't know what you think you're doing with that _slut_. I don't give a damn if you think you're _in love_ , or if you're just using her holes," he said venomously. He jabbed a finger in the direction of Wesker's face, his arm trembling with rage. "But you are _not_ going to drag me down with you. You're going to call it off, whatever it is, right now. And if you're lucky... she won't end up dead."

* * *

 _ **Present.**_

Claire bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, bracing herself for the sound of the pistol firing. The smell of gun smoke and blood. Sudden pain, or shocking cold, or darkness.

 _Quick,_ she thought, as she tried not to tremble on the wet, muddy ground. _Make it quick. Fast as blinking. Fast and easy._

She held her breath. Rocks dug into her knees. The gun was very close, and very still. She hoped Chris wouldn't come looking for her. Hoped he'd never find her body, the village full of infected, hoped he'd-

She heard Wesker's voice. It was quick and frantic, and even without knowing _what_ he said, she recognized the jagged edge of fear to his words.

She opened her eyes, and saw him motion towards her desperately. He was _pleading_ with the woman, in her language. His gaze flickered urgently between them, from Claire to the woman and back again.

The guard said something. His voice was sharp and sudden, cutting Wesker short. Claire flinched, her heart stuttering.

 _Mtoto._ It was the one word that stood out. The man spat it through his teeth, like it had an unpleasant taste.

It was the same word Wesker had used as he gestured frantically at her. The same word the woman used with a weary sigh as she turned towards Claire, and nodded towards the guard.

The gun slipped a fraction of an inch.

Miriam, he'd called her. She was young. She watched Clarie with a strange look in her eyes - part anger, part distrust.

Part pity.

Wesker spoke to her in a low voice. He looked back towards the river, towards the stretch of forest that separated them from the resort. And with one final, reluctant command from Miriam, the guard's arm fell away. Her skin throbbed where the cold metal of the gun had been.

Claire felt the whole of her body sag, suddenly limp and heavy.

"Stand," the man said in heavily accented English. She heard rocks crunching beneath his boots as he stepped back. "You are lucky today, _Nyekundu_ …" He trailed off. She twisted to look at him, and saw him watching Wesker closely, his dark eyes narrowed to a glare.

" _Lucky._ " He shook his head and wiped the rain from his eyes. He waved the pistol limply towards her, and she pushed herself up from the ground, palms slipping in the mud.

Lucky and alive.

* * *

Claire struggled to keep up with him as he stormed back to the resort.

The rain had stopped, and the clouds had parted, turning the jungle into a miserable sauna. Steam curled up and around them. Her damp hair stuck to her cheeks and her throat and her lips, and she spluttered, brushing it away. Branches scratched her arms as she wove through the brush.

And he hadn't said a word.

He hadn't said a fucking _word_ about the other side of the river. The village. The fishing nets bobbing in the water, and the clothes drying on lines, and the people - infected men and women and children - living there.

 _Living._ After he'd let the group...let her friends and her family and _her_...spend months believing they were alone. _Safe._ Far, far away from the monsters that had ripped the world apart.

Farther than three miles.

She stumbled over a gnarled root, swearing, catching herself on the moss-covered trunk of the tree beside her. The bark bit into her palm. She glared up after him, already retreating deeper into the thick green leaves and the misty shadows.

She paused, just for a moment, and braced herself against the tree, panting in the oppressive heat.

He stopped, but he didn't turn around.

She scowled at his back, between his shoulder blades. Down at the wet green-brown earth. Up at the sky, shining piercingly blue through the canopy.

And then his back again.

He stood very still, and very straight, waiting for her frail, stupid, entirely human body to figure itself out. She imagined he was glaring too, into the wild tangle of the forest, furious that she'd managed to uncover his little _secret._

The thought made her bristle.

"Sorry I'm slowing you down," she said, leaning heavily against the tree. The air was oppressive, and her lungs felt heavy, as if she was drowning in the muggy air. "I'm just tired after meeting the neighbors. Maybe it was the gun digging into my head. Or seeing that guy's face _open the fuck up_."

She heard his heavy breath, nearly a sigh. She saw his shoulders rise and fall with it.

"What are they? Is that plaga? _Las plagas_?"

He didn't reply. He wouldn't even look at her.

Leon had told her about the parasite when he'd come back from Spain. He said it was still in his skull - dead, but taking up real estate in his fucking brain, like a bomb waiting to go off. Doctors who didn't know what the hell to do about it told him to keep his blood pressure down… and pray.

But those people, in the fishing village, weren't the mindless, half-alive peasants Leon had described. Not at all. They were fast and healthy and _organized_. Organized better than her own group.

And Wesker had been content to protect them.

She pushed off the tree trunk and stomped straight up to his back. It was hot. It was so damn _hot_ out. Her head was pounding, her pulse was spiking. Her voice was louder then, and her vision seemed red at the edges, as she bellowed at his impassive figure. "Did that shit just slip your mind? A hundred goddamn monsters, that you can't even _control_? You know what? _Fuck_ y—"

He spun around quickly. So quickly that she nearly stumbled back, but his hand was on her face, holding her still, holding her upright.

She winced, his stiff fingers digging like claws into the hot flesh of her cheeks. His eyes were a shade of deep garnet in the afternoon light. They held her own in an unwavering stare.

"Be very quiet now," he commanded softly.

She took a sharp breath, her nostrils flared, her teeth gritted so hard she thought they might crack. His grip loosened, and she felt the slightest tremor in his fingers.

His hand dropped from her face. She opened her mouth. She felt the quiver of her jaw as she stared at him, impotent rage burning like acid on her tongue.

"I hate you," she whispered. "I hate you so _fucking_ much."

"I don't care," he whispered back, his face inches from her own. He turned away from her and continued down the path.

And then the only sound was the trilling of insects in the canopy and their footfalls, softened by the blanket of wet leaves that covered the jungle floor.

* * *

 _ **February 4, 1992.**_

He dragged himself through the front door, kicking it closed. In the dark, he felt for the deadbolt and jerked the knob up so that the uneven lock eventually slid into place.

Exhausted, barely able to function, he reached down and yanked the laces of his heavy boots open until he could stumble out of them. He shrugged off his long coat and let it gather around his feet on the floor. Then he tugged the knot of his tie, yanked it over his head, and then pulled his shirt tails from his waistband.

He had an hour, maybe less, before he heard from the Umbrella Intelligence Bureau. The floorboards of the old farmhouse creaked as he made his way down the moonlit hall, trying to gather his thoughts. He needed to sit for a moment. He needed a glass of water, and the cold, quiet night air around him as he looked over the most recent report.

He needed a scalding shower. Every muscle ached. He unbuttoned the cuff of one sleeve, rolling it up to his elbow, and reached for the other.

He paused as he saw a flicker of red light in the shadows. The answering machine blinked steadily on the console table.

He felt his heart seize at the sight of it.

He could ignore it. He _would_ ignore it. He would undo his dress shirt, and walk to the kitchen, and focus, _focus_ on what he needed to do...

But instead… he slowly, painfully, lifted his hand, and touched the play button.

 _Tuesday, February four, nineteen-ninety-two, eight-seventeen p-m_ , the machine told him.

"It's me again." He closed his eyes as her voice echoed through his empty house. "I don't…I don't expect anything from you. But I need to talk to you. I have something to tell you. It's important. I am at the club tonight, yes? Please… just call me back."

 _Repeat message?_ the machine asked.

He stared at the wall, and he pressed another button.

 _Message erased_. _Good-bye._


End file.
